Geographical analysis of the vernacular

Abstract

The BBC Voices project of 2005 resulted in a large repository of lexical, phonological and grammatical data from the UK, which included geographical references. In order to investigate the relationship between language and geography, various clustering algorithms have been applied to the BBC Voices data. Results show a clear spatial relationship, with well-defined, contiguous regions of UK language being identified. In order to prove the clustering methodology, Bayesian models have been generated for each region, and these have been tested using a set of non-standard expressions contributed by a small number of participants. Results of this second stage indicate that the models are, in most cases, able to identify the geographical region of each test participant based on the linguistic items they use.

The Information School at the University of Sheffield, 1963-2013

“…For example, much of the chemical research has been funded by the international pharmaceutical industry, and many of the projects carried out by the School's Centre for the Public Library and Information in Society have been carried out in collaboration with public library authorities. Other recent examples of collaborative projects have involved organisations as diverse as the British Library (Holliday et al, 2013), NHS Direct (Hsu et al, 2013), Rolls Royce (Petrelli et al, 2011) and the National Archives (Clough et al, 2011).…”

Mackems, Geordiesandram-raiders: documenting regional variation in historical dictionaries

“…Work in the last several decades has highlighted the complex issues involved in analysing the distribution of lexis in England from a synchronic (or in some cases relatively shallow diachronic) perspective. For approaches to both traditional dialect lexis (as, for example, in the materials from the Survey of English Dialects ( SED )) and lexis associated with modern regional or urban varieties (as, for example, collected through the BBC Voices project), see Viereck (1986), Upton et al (1994), Thomas (1997), Holliday et al (2013), Wieling et al (2014) inter alia . Documenting this complexity even from a synchronic perspective, still less a diachronic one, poses enormous challenges for historical dictionaries, both in terms of data and labelling.…”