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Inferring the Origin of Linguistic Features from an Atlas: A Case Study of Swiss-German Dialects. (Short Paper)
Authors
Takuya Takahashi 
,
Elvira Glaser ,
Peter Ranacher
-
Part of:
Volume:
16th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2024)
Series: Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)
Conference: Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT) - License:
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
- Publication Date: 2024-09-09
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Document Identifiers
Author Details
- Department of Geography, University of Zurich, Switzerland
- NCCR Evolving Language, University of Zurich, Switzerland
- German department, University of Zurich, Switzerland
- URPP Language and Space, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
We thank Nico Neureiter for valuable discussion.
Cite AsGet BibTex
Takuya Takahashi, Elvira Glaser, and Peter Ranacher. Inferring the Origin of Linguistic Features from an Atlas: A Case Study of Swiss-German Dialects. (Short Paper). In 16th International Conference on Spatial Information Theory (COSIT 2024). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 315, pp. 18:1-18:9, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.COSIT.2024.18
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.COSIT.2024.18
Abstract
A linguistic atlas is a set of maps which visualize the geographical variation of linguistic features in a single language. We present a novel model for Bayesian statistics which infers when and where the variants of a linguistic feature were invented based on the geographical distribution shown in a linguistic atlas. Based on a spatial network representing the rate of diffusion between locations, our model evaluates the probability (likelihood) that the observed geographical pattern is realized by considering the genealogical relationship between variants at different locations. We apply our model to a linguistic atlas of Swiss-German dialects and infer the origin of three forms of the High-German word "nein" meaning "no".
Subject Classification
ACM Subject Classification
- Mathematics of computing → Bayesian computation
Keywords
- Dialectology
- Linguistic geography
- Geographic information science
- Bayesian inference
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References
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