Further Contributions to Romance Dialectometry

Jean Séguy and Hans Goebl were the founders both of Romance dialectometry and of dialectometry in general, which focused largely on Romance languages in its early years. While other attention to dialects had appealed to scholarly intuition to adduce the principles behind the geographic distribution of linguistic variation, dialectometry insisted on employing exact methods and on basing analyses on entire large samples of material. The samples may often be found in dialect atlases, which pre-dialectometry scholars had assiduously compiled. Dialectometry thus continues the work of dialectology but always proceeding from entire large data collections and using methods that are more exact. It would nonetheless be a mistake to regard dialectometry as purely a methodological contribution, for dialectometry enables new research questions as well as sharper versions of traditional ones, which it has also pursued. Most centrally, dialectometry asks how geography influences linguistic variation, contrasting, for example, the perspective of discrete dialect areas with that of continua or examining the influence of distance or dialect areas on differences among varieties. It further seeks to characterize the sorts of variation involved (i.e., which sounds, words, or grammatical elements are involved) and aspires to characterize linguistic variation in ways that facilitate comparison to variation in other cultural dimensions such as religion, ethnicity, or mobility. Further work on Romance dialectometry has built on Séguy’s and Goebl’s innovative foundations (see ORE article on the Salzburg school) and has expanded the empirical scope of the research line to include non-geographic influences as well. Further contributions to this area of study have conducted analyses on different Romance language areas and have incorporated novel data collection protocols, new measures of pronunciation differences as encoded in phonetic transcription (edit distance), and novel statistical analyses, notably the application of multidimensional scaling, mixed-effects regression techniques, and generalized additive models. Emerging questions in dialectometry include attention to linguistic levels beyond phonetics and lexicology, the stricter validation of its techniques, more effective means of identifying the most important linguistic bases exploited in dialectal differentiation, and naturally the continued research into the enormous range of linguistic variation and its geographic distribution.