I was invited by the University of Amsterdam to give a talk on computational dialectology (also my thesis) today at the ACLC Seminar. It was a pleasure to present there and I had a great time discussing issues in dialectology (on Yue, German, Italian) and methods. What a great day!

Let's see when I will be able to give these workshops again in the near future~

I am very happy to share that my dialectology/ dialectometry workshop series has ended on a high note! We went through some contemporary approaches around the world, including modern field methods, addressing explanatory and tonal dialectometry, comparison of different linguistic levels etc.

Today, we looked at corpus-based approaches in dialectometry. I gave my students a variety of texts and asked them to come up with ways to compare dialects, then we went through some existing ways in corpus dialectometry, including works from @jwgrieve.bsky.social, @kuparinen.bsky.social and my own

And based these analyses, they proposed a classification based on what they see in MDS, cluster analysis and network maps.

After that, I introduced what other uses of dialectometric techniques there could be, beyond dialect classification.

My students gave some presentations on their data exploration project on Irish, Korean and Kyushu Japanese (gratitudes to the people who shared their data with me for my classes) today. They showed us their interpretations of the dialect distances...

In today's dialectometry workshop, we looked at how to classify dialects using cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling. After introducing these methods, I did a demo using a dialectometric app I wrote on Bulgarian.

My article on corpus-based dialect classification of Southern Dutch dialects is out! Check out my dialectometric classification using topic modelling and N-gram on the GCND dialect corpus here:

www.jbe-platform.com/content/jour...

Students calculated Relative Distance Value and Levenshtein distances by hand (and I went over the answers by hand too)!

Today, we have finally started the second half of the dialectology workshop series - Computational dialectology/ dialectometry! We looked at why we want to use computational approaches to start with, then we explored different data types and then we moved on to distance calculations.

I present, the lenition hypercube

In this week's workshop, we looked at dialect comparison and historical reconstruction using dialect data. We ended with tracing origin and time when an innovated started using a glottogram from Japanese dialectology. Rulers and pencils were used in the process!

Just gave a presentation online at the 29th International Conference on Yue Dialects. I talked about using computational methods to blend dialectometry and sociolinguistics in order to study Yue dialect changes in real- and apparent-time (3 generations).

In this week's dialectology workshop, I gave an introduction to QGIS. Students were given a dataset and we created a range of maps like point maps, display maps, frequency maps and isogloss maps. We also looked at what possibilities there are with QGIS, with examples from my previous works.

Gave a small introduction to some non-linguists (my music association) on Austrian German (and Slovenian) dialects tonight 😁

In today's dialectology workshop, we explored how we can extract and digitise (transfer data from paper to the computer) from different linguistic atlases and surveys. I also got many sign ups for our digitisation project!

I see! This seems to be a problem with several linguistic atlases unfortunately.

For my students, I have found a very nice example for how to use symbology for linguistic variation. Check out this example from the Czech linguistic atlas!

I have one map from her atlas (as an example for point-symbol map). The focus for the upcoming workshop us to show how data can be visualised through various types of maps~

The material include atlases from the German, Dutch, Romance, American, Swiss traditions, with languages ranging from Slavic to Arabic to Irish to Cantonese!

Linguistic Atlas Day

It's that time of year again! Tomorrow, I will be looking at maps from various linguistic atlases around the world with my students, and we will explore how we can visualise dialect data on maps!

Have you spotted any atlases you have worked with before?

We then looked at what 'dialectology' is concerned with and the history of the field. Next week, students will bring in some pics of the linguistic atlases they have discovered in the library (treasure hunting) and we will go from there!

The first workshop of the dialectology series went smoothly! We discussed how what 'dialect' could refer to, and students realised from the discussions that it is not an easy task to distinguish language from dialect, and many factors are involved.

This Friday, I will be giving a talk at the Comparative Indo-European Linguistics (CIEL) Seminars, this time on how dialectometric methods can help us study historical linguistics, with case studies from Indo-European languages.
www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/20...

In the second half of the series, we will explore how computational methods can help us process more data as well as obtain an understanding of the underlying structure of our dialect data. We will start from popular dialectometric methods to more contemporary ones. 2/2

The series will start from methods in traditional dialectology/ dialect geography. Then we will explore how we can digitise dialect data from physical atlases for further analyses, including synchronic comparison and historical reconstruction. 1/2

*Dialectology/ Dialectometry workshop series*

The upcoming workshop series (for students in the Netherlands) is now open for registration! It starts on the 30th Sept, and there is a workshop every Tuesday until December. More details and register here:
universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/2025…

*Dialectology/ Dialectometry workshop series*

The upcoming workshop series (for students in the Netherlands) is now open for registration! It starts on the 30th Sept, and there is a workshop every Tuesday until December. More details and register here:
universiteitleiden.nl/en/events/2025…

After years of searching, finally I have found a way to plot a Kombinationskarte or a Honeycomb map (with a little bit of help from ChatGPT) on QGIS! This map allows us to find dialect borders of different strength. Here's an example with Vergeiner's (2025) Aus. German data.

XFiles S1:E6: Scully pops open Praat and Mulder talks about the formants