Lecture
Beyond Classifications and Segments: Recent developments in understanding the dialectal variation of tonal languages
- Date
- Tuesday 16 September 2025
- Time
- Address
-
Johan Huizinga
Doelensteeg 16
2311 VL Leiden - Room
- Digital Lab, Huizinga 0.09 and Online (email digital-lab@hum.leidenuniv.nl for link)
Beyond Classifications and Segments: Recent developments in understanding the dialectal variation of tonal languages
Dialectometry is the quantitative branch of dialectology which utilizes computational methods to calculate linguistic distances and generate visualizations which allow us to explore relationships between dialects. Although dialectometry is a growing field with an increasing number of new approaches, some corners in dialectal variation are still rather unexplored. Firstly, the outcome of a dialectometric analysis is usually a classification of dialects, but the features that contribute to this classification, i.e. dialect features which are characteristic to certain groups, are often not explored in these classifications. Next, 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. In this talk, I shall address the issues raised above based on the latest work done in Leiden.
Location: Digital Lab, Huizinga 0.09 and Online, email digital-lab@hum.leidenuniv.nl for link.