Work

Drawing areal information from a corpus of noisy dialect data

Year: 2020

Type: article

Abstract: This article is an analysis of linguistic survey data representing German dialects in Switzerland in 1933/34 based on the so-called Wenker sentences. The data are impressionistic in terms of applied phonetic transcriptions, which were produced by non-specialists using the Latin alphabet. Due to the lack of pre-defined standardization, the phonetic transcriptions are very heterogeneous. From a technical perspective, this leads to very noisy data, which is why the validity of the Wenker data in general and the Swiss Wenker data in particular has been questioned. Using methods from computational linguistics, we compare, for the first time, Wenker data with linguistic data collected at virtually the same time by linguistics professionals. Direct comparison with a sample from the published atlas of German-speaking Switzerland (SDS) reveals that despite the noisiness of the data, they nevertheless provide reliable information, e.g., in terms of the spatial structuring of Swiss dialects. The study is thus a successful pilot for other corpus-based studies dealing with unstructured Wenker data in other regions.

Source: Journal of Linguistic Geography

DOI: 10.1017/jlg.2020.4

Authors: Alfred Lameli, Elvira Glaser, Philipp Stöckle

Institutions: University of Freiburg, University of Zurich, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities

Language: English

Topic: Linguistic Variation and Morphology

Subfield: Linguistics and Language

Field: Social Sciences

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: hybrid

Estimated APC paid: $3,160

Funders: National Science Foundation, Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung