Toolbox for Analyzing Dialect Data

Motivation and Goal: Dialect data, for instance regarding different syntax practices in Switzerland, often share the same characteristics: they tend to be unevenly distributed in space (in particular if collected through online questionnaires or mobile apps), with varying numbers of answers per location, and each linguistic feature may take on a different number of categorical values. For this reason, we decided to develop a toolbox that would formalize a standard spatial analysis workflow for dialect data. The analysis includes visual as well as statistical output and allows conducting a large series of tests one step at a time. The toolbox will be freely available as an R package.

Cooperation: This project was set up in close cooperation between Prof. Elvira Glaser and Dr Philipp Stöckle as part of the SNSF-project "Modelling morphosyntactic area formation in Swiss German (SynMod)" and the SDS Group.