Phonetic Distance between Dutch Dialects

Traditional dialectology relies on identifying language features which are common to one dialect area while distinguishing it from others. It has difficulty in dealing with partial matches of features and with nonoverlapping language patterns. This paper applies Levenshtein distance—a measure of string distance—to pronunciations to overcome both of these difficulties. Partial matches may be quantified, and nonoverlapping patterns may be included in weighted averages of phonetic distance. The result accords with traditonal dialectology to a satisfying degree.