Visualizing regional language variation across Europe on Twitter

Geotagged Twitter data allows us to investigate correlations of geographic language variation, both at an interlingual and intralingual level. Based on data-driven studies of such relationships, this paper investigates regional variation of language usage on Twitter across Europe and compares it to traditional research of regional variation. This paper presents a novel method to process large amounts of data and to capture gradual differences in language variation. Visualizing the results by deterministically translating linguistic features into color hues presents a novel view of language variation across Europe, as it is reflected on Twitter. The technique is easy to apply to large amounts of data and provides a fast visual reference that can serve as input for further qualitative studies. The general applicability is demonstrated on a number of studies both across and within national languages. This paper also discusses the unique challenges of large-scale analysis and visualization, and the complementary nature of traditional qualitative and data-driven quantitative methods, and argues for their possible synthesis

Language Mapping Worldwide: Methods and Traditions

The chapter provides an overview about methods and traditions of linguistic cartography in the past and present. Mapping language and mapping language-related data meets an increasing interest not only in disciplines such as dialectology and language typology, which are the classical domains of linguistic cartography, but also in sociolinguistics and theoretical linguistics. The chapter is structured in three main parts. First, the purposes of language mapping are introduced, ranging from visualization of the position of linguistic features in geographic space (the basic purpose of language mapping) through issues in language classification to correlations between linguistic and nonlinguistic features. Second, a formal typology of language maps based on their symbolization is given, distinguishing point-related maps, line-related maps, area-related maps, and surface maps. Third, major language mapping traditions worldwide are sketched in as much detail as possible in a short overview. The descriptions consider examples from all areas of the world (including reprints of maps and map details). A section on the effects of computerization on language mapping concludes the chapter