2022/05/17 by Link, Samantha
#Dialect-Classification #FOS: Languages and literature #German Dialects #Hierarchical Clustering #Phonotactics #Quantitative Linguistics #Vowels
paper · doi:10.57712/2021-03
This work adresses the question, which role vowel-information plays when hierarchically clustering German dialects. When comparing the results of three different settings of the data (unmodified vowel information; vowels replaced by „V“; vowels completely removed), it can be observed that in each case the data strongly tends to form the same three main clusters, corresponding to the large dialect-areas Upper German, Low German/East Central German and West Central German. The fact that each setting approximately gives the same result suggests that vowels only play a minor role for phonotactically clustering German dialects, although they make up 30% of the data.