Geographic Distributions of Linguistic Variation Reflect Dynamics of Differentiation

The oldest branch of dialectology is the study of what is today often referred to as " dialect geography " , i.e. the study of the geographical distribution of language varieties, as opposed to the study of many other relations between language varieties and external conditioning factors, such as social class, age, and sex. While it is clear that geography has a massive influence on the distribution of language varieties, and that closer varieties are normally more linguistically alike than more distant ones, still there have been surprisingly few attempts to examine these relationships with an eye toward more general formulations. Trudgill (1974) is an honorable exception to this last generalization. Trudgill proceeds from the very plausible assumptions that closer dialects must influence each other most strongly, and that intensity of social contact is likely to determine the degree of influence. He shows how to tie these ideas together in a model which hypothesizes a gravity-like attraction between dialect varieties , where population is the analog to physical mass, and geographic distance plays its customary role. He adduces evidence in support of this view, relying on selected dialect features. Although we wish to contribute to the understanding of the general principles underlying the geographic distribution of linguistic variation, we structure our paper as a test of the very specific gravity hypothesis advanced by Trudgill, according it the attention we feel it deserves as an early attempt at a general formulation of the the principles of how geography influences variation. Dialectometry provides the more general tools with which such relation-and the present paper is an attempt to apply dialectometry to evaluate Trudgill's ideas more systematically. In fact it has been common to examine the dependence of dialect distance on geography from the earliest work on in dialecto-There has been no systematic examination of Trudgill's gravity hypothesis from a dialectometric perspective, however. In the current paper we expose Trudgill's fundamental ideas to dialec-tometric examination. The following section presents Trudgill's ideas, their motivation and an overview of previous work. Section 3 describes the experiment , including the data sources, and Section 4 presents the results, which certainly do not provide confirmation for the importance of the role of gravity, 2 Contents or centripetal forces due to social interaction. The final section discusses these results, and suggests an interpretation which does not dismiss gravity, which after all, is theoretically well-founded, but which emphasizes that …