Dialect variation in Scottish Gaelic nominal morphology: A quantitative study

This paper presents a dialectometric analysis of Scottish Gaelic morphology, with a focus on the noun phrase, using previously unpublished data from the Linguistic Survey of Scotland. Fifty-five morphological features were extracted across 201 survey points, and the data subjected to a variety of analyses, including cluster analysis, regression, and correlation analysis. We establish that the Gaelic noun system shows robust diatopic (i. e. geographical) variation; this challenges previous assertions in the literature, which describe Gaelic morphosyntax as geographically uniform. In addition, we argue that our dialectometric results provide an insight into the grammatical structure of the language that is not easily achievable through the analysis of individual varieties. In particular, we argue that the results highlight a dissociation between morphological categories such as case and gender and their morphophonological exponents, which are particularly complex in Scottish Gaelic. The paper thus serves as a proof of concept for the use of dialectometric findings in a theoretical context

Gaelic dialects present and past: a study of modern and medieval dialect relationships in the Gaelic languages

This thesis focuses on the historical development of dialectal variation in the Gaelic languages with special reference to Irish. As a point of departure, competing scholarly theories concerning the historical relationships between Goidelic dialects are laid out. Next, these theories are tested using dialectometric methods of linguistic analysis. Dialectometry clearly suggests the Irish of Ulster is the most linguistically distinctive of Irish dialects. This perspective on the modern dialects is utilised in subsequent chapters to clarify our understanding of the history of Gaelic dialectal variation, especially during the Old Irish period (AD 600–900). Theoretical and methodological frameworks that have been used in the study of the historical dialectology of Gaelic are next outlined. It is argued that these frameworks may not be the most appropriate for investigating dialectal variation during the Old Irish period. For the first time, principles from historical sociolinguistics are here applied in investigating the language of the Old Irish period. In particular, the social and institutional structures which supported the stability of Old Irish as a text language during the 8th and 9th centuries are scrutinised from this perspective. The role of the ecclesiastical and political centre of Armagh as the principal and central actor in the relevant network structures is highlighted. Focus then shifts to the processes through which ‘standard’ languages emerge, with special reference to Old Irish. The evidence of a small number of texts upon which modern understandings of Old Irish was based is assessed; it is argued that these texts most likely emerged from monasteries in the northeast of Ireland and the southwest of Scotland. Secondly, the processes through which the standard of the Old Irish period is likely to have come about are investigated. It is concluded that the standard language of the period arose primarily through the agency of monastic schools in the northeast of Ireland, particularly Armagh and Bangor. It is argued that this fact, and the subsequent prominence of Armagh as a stable and supremely prestigious centre of learning throughout the period, offers a sociolinguistically robust explanation for the apparent lack of dialectal variation in the language. Finally, the socio-political situation of the Old Irish period is discussed. Models of new-dialect formation are applied to historical evidence, and combined with later linguistic evidence, in an attempt to enunciate dialectal divisions which may have existed during the period

A dialect distance metric based on string and temporal alignment

The Levenshtein distance is an established metric to represent phonological distances between dialects. So far, this metric has usually been applied on manually transcribed word lists. In this study we introduce several extensions of the Levenshtein distance by incorporating probabilistic edit costs as well as temporal alignment costs. We tested all variants for compliance with the axioms that within-dialect utterance pairs are phonologically more similar than across-dialect ones. In contrast to former studies we are not applying the metrics on preselected, prototypical word lists but on real connected speech data which was automatically segmented and labeled. It turned out, that the transcription edit distances already performed well in reflecting the difference between within- and across-dialect comparisons, and that the adding of a temporal component rather weakens the performance of the metrics

An integrated dialect analysis tool using phonetics and acoustics

This study aimed to verify a computational phonetic and acoustic analysis tool created in the MATLAB environment. A dataset was obtained containing 3 broad American dialects (Northern, Western and New England) from the TIMIT database using words that also appeared in the Swadesh list. Each dialect consisted of 20 speakers uttering 10 sentences. Verification using phonetic comparisons between dialects was made by calculating the Levenshtein distance in Gabmap and the proposed software tool. Agreement between the linguistic distances using each analysis method was found. Each tool showed increasing linguistic distance as a function of increasing geographic distance, in a similar shape to Seguy's curve. The proposed tool was then further developed to include acoustic characterisation capability of inter dialect dynamics. Significant variation between dialects was found for the pitch, trajectory length and spectral rate of change for 7 of the phonetic vowels investigated. Analysis of the vowel area using the 4 corner vowels indicated that for male speakers, geographically closer dialects have smaller variations in vowel space area than those further apart. The female utterances did not show a similar pattern of linguistic distance likely due to the lack of one corner vowel /u/, making the vowel space a triangle