THE IMPACT OF PHONETIC INFORMATION IN DIALECTOMETRY – A CASE STUDY OF HUNGARIAN DIALECT ATLASES

Vargha, Fruzsina S. (2018) THE IMPACT OF PHONETIC INFORMATION IN DIALECTOMETRY – A CASE STUDY OF HUNGARIAN DIALECT ATLASES. Dialectologia, 21. pp. 185-208. ISSN 2013-2247

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Abstract

The paper investigates the effect of the quantity of phonetic detail contained in the transcribed data on dialectometric output. The original narrow transcriptions of Hungarian dialect atlases are gradually broadened and the similarity matrices computed with the Levenshtein algorithm from the broader forms are compared to the one corresponding to the original form. Correlations are high for the majority of investigation points, but dialect enclaves and a number of locations situated at dialect borders are exceptions. For enclaves, a phonetically sensitive matrix shows the linguistic similarity with the “home” dialects more accurately, while a very broad transcription, lacking most phonetic details, thus more likely to reveal similarities at the lexical level, is suitable to highlight the recent impacts of the geographically close dialects. Findings on rich Hungarian dialect data and using a cost effective, computational method corroborate the results of previous studies regarding lexical vs. phonetic similarities.

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