This Perceptual Dialectology (PD) study asked residents of Cardiff, Wales, about their perceptions of English in the United Kingdom (UK). In addition, because face to face exposure to dialect variation has rarely been included as a variable in PD studies, participants were asked about their travel experience to ascertain whether this might influence their responses to a PD map task. Participants’ responses to the map task were analyzed using ArcGIS to create composite maps. Results show that these Cardiffians perceive “dialect or regional” speech boundaries to be located around major cities in England and Wales but also southwest Wales. Composite maps and polygon counts suggest that the more traveled respondents have a more nuanced perception of dialect regions than those who claim to travel less, suggesting that travel experience may influence PD participants’ responses to map tasks.

This study explores perceptions held by speakers of Qassimi Arabic (a variety of Najdi Arabic, spoken in central Saudi Arabia) about linguistic variation in their own dialect, and the sociocultural evaluations associated with their perceptions. Drawing on perceptual dialectology research methods, respondents completed the draw-a-map and labeling tasks. The maps were collected and then analyzed using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) mapping software to aggregate, query, and create a composite heat map. Findings indicate that Qassimi speakers perceive regional variation to be associated with urban centers, particularly Buraydah and Unayzah, which were identified as the most salient dialect areas. Analysis of the labeled maps generated six categories of evaluative comments: drawl, influences from other regional dialects, heavy accent, old vocabulary, fast, and affrication. These findings point to the need for further exploration of the underlying ideologies and social values that Arabic speakers have about their own dialects and other dialects in Arabic-speaking communities.

This article is an analysis of linguistic survey data representing German dialects in Switzerland in 1933/34 based on the so-called Wenker sentences. The data are impressionistic in terms of applied phonetic transcriptions, which were produced by non-specialists using the Latin alphabet. Due to the lack of pre-defined standardization, the phonetic transcriptions are very heterogeneous. From a technical perspective, this leads to very noisy data, which is why the validity of the Wenker data in general and the Swiss Wenker data in particular has been questioned. Using methods from computational linguistics, we compare, for the first time, Wenker data with linguistic data collected at virtually the same time by linguistics professionals. Direct comparison with a sample from the published atlas of German-speaking Switzerland (SDS) reveals that despite the noisiness of the data, they nevertheless provide reliable information, e.g., in terms of the spatial structuring of Swiss dialects. The study is thus a successful pilot for other corpus-based studies dealing with unstructured Wenker data in other regions.

In this paper we introduce a computationally enriched experimental tool designed to investigate language ideology (change). In a free response experiment, 211 respondents returned three adjectives in reaction to the labels for five regional varieties, one ethnic variety and two supra-regional varieties of Belgian Dutch, as well as the standard accent of Netherlandic Dutch. Valence information (pertaining to the positive/negative character of the responses) and big data–based distributional analysis (to detect semantic similarity between the responses) were used to cluster the response adjectives into 11 positive and 11 negative evaluative dimensions. Correspondence analysis was subsequently used to compute and visualize the associations between these evaluative dimensions and the investigated language labels, in order to generate “perceptual maps” of the Belgian language repertoire. Contrary to our expectations, these maps unveiled not only the dominant value system which drives standard usage, but also the competing ideology which frames the increasingly occurring non-standard forms. In addition, they revealed a much richer stratification than the “one variety good, all other varieties bad” dichotomy we had anticipated: while VRT-Dutch remains the superior (albeit increasingly virtual) standard for Belgian Dutch, the stigmatized colloquial variety Tussentaal is gradually being accepted as a practical lingua franca, and the Ghent-accent is boosted by modern prestige (dynamism) features. Even more crucially, separate perceptual maps for the older and younger respondents lay bare generational change: there is a growing conceptual proximity between VRT-Dutch and Tussentaal in the younger perceptions.