Difference Coefficients for Determining Dialect Relatedness

This paper presents a method of determining the degree of relatedness of the dialects of a language based on difference coefficients which are determined by assigning number values to the degree of feature difference between lexical items on survey word lists. Then a tentative phonological reconstruction of the Proto language \u273^‘ft from which the dialects are descended was done using m \u27 ■’t\u27-f - \u27 l ...•* 100 utterances on a standard survey word list in each of the ten dialects. The reconstruction is very tentative ... because of the limited amount of data available in each dialect. A family tree was prepared using the innovations • \u27 • : :% f - t- *•\u27 5 *,-%*. • • ,• ... • - that various dialects shared in common as they descended from the proto language to their contemporary forms. Then the family tree prepared from the results obtained from the first method - that of determining relatedness by difference coefficient is compared with the, more commonly accepted as reliable, results obtained from the shared innovations