Recent Advances in Computational Dialectology – Towards Explanatory and Tonal Dialectometry

Matthew Sung, Leiden University (LUCDH/ LUCL)

Dialectometry is the quantitative branch of dialectology which uses computational methods to calculate linguistic distances and generate visualisations to explore relationships between dialects. A dialectometric analysis reflects a more representative picture of dialect variation (Nerbonne 2010), as it accounts for “all the occurrences [of features]” present in the data (Embleton et al. 2015). However, even though dialectometry is a growing field with an increasing number of new approaches, some corners in dialectal variation are still rather unexplored.

First of all, the dialect classification from a dialectometric analysis is often not able to return the “details or explanations of the identified dialect partitions” (Sung and Prokić 2024). Hence, dialect features which are characteristic to certain groups are not explored in these classifications. Secondly, most of the work on phonetic variation are based on segments, while most of the world’s languages are tonal (Yip 2002). It is unclear how dialects vary on the tonal level, and whether tonal variation shows similar geographical patterns with segments. In this talk, I will address the issues raised above based on the latest dialectometric works done in Leiden.