Dialectometry

The Dialektometrie is a research direction within linguistics. It deals with the discovery of high-level as possible governance structures in language- geographical networks.

The research interest is focused primarily on the regional distribution of dialect similarity, dialect relates cores and transition zones, which are characterized by a more or less slight dialect variance between adjacent locations. The empirical data base used language atlases documenting minutely the dialectal profile of a large number of survey locations.

Different from the numerical classification methods known are used to abstract from the data underlying the language atlases basic patterns and then to visualize.

As a result, one must not expect a single classification. Rather, each of the other aspects of this basic pattern can be detected by various methods. In principle, the Dialektometrie in the variety of taxometrischen method and the associated results, or to the linguistic interpretations arising from this source is interested.