The relationship between phonological and geographical distance. Umlaut on the diminutive in Dutch dialects

Recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in the application of modern methodology to the study of geographic language variation. One instance of this, applied to the Dutch language area, is the topic of dialectometry. It seems fair to say that the measurements in most dialectometrical projects are fairly superficial from a grammatical point of view. In this article, we propose a view of dialect distance which is radically different both in its methodology and in its goals. We present a view in which the distances between grammars are computed rather than the differences between words or... Mehr ...