Dialectometry

Dialectology is one of the sub-disciplines in the humanities that embraced digital techniques early on. The use of computational and quantitative techniques in dialectology is known as ‘dialectometry’. The present collection of articles contain several which proudly continue working within dialectometry’s usual assumptions and toward its established goals, honing existing techniques, and experimenting with novel ones, but also, significantly, several articles that depart deliberately from earlier modes, returning to individual phenomena (as opposed to aggregates), examining new sources of data (not taken from atlases), applying dialectometric techniques to sociolinguistic and diachronic research questions, seeking explanations for geographic distributions in semantics and in complexity theory, and experimenting with techniques from spatial statistics, geographic information systems, and image analysis