On Dialect Typicality and Transitional Dialects

Abstract

Since the late 19th century, dialectologists have already noticed that dialect areas do not have abrupt borders, but gradual transitions from one zone to another. One could speak of ‘focal’ or ‘core’ vs. ‘transitional’ areas for relatively homogenous areas vs. regions with linguistic variants from different neighbours. Dialectometry, the computational branch of dialectology, offers tools to capture and visualise dialect transitions. These techniques can show the global transition patterns, but not for which features, and in what way are they contributing to the transition. On the other hand, detailed studies on individual (often singleton) features in variationist sociolinguistics offer us insights to the details in the way dialects transition from one area to another. But the limit of close examination is the possible over-generalisation of the pattern of one feature over many other features in the dialects. In addition, it is not possible for humans to analyse every single variable in the data manually. In this paper, a new approach is proposed to explore dialect transitions on the feature level, namely the dialect typicality decay analysis. This novel approach builds on previous approaches in dialectometry (automatic dialect classification and feature extraction), and it explores how transitional (and prototypical) dialects possess characteristic features of a particular dialect group. Two main issues are explored using dialect typicality analysis: 1) what does dialect transition look like based on their top characteristic features? and 2) do transitional dialects favour adopting the most typical features from a certain dialect group?