Perceptive evaluation of Levenshtein dialect distance measurements using Norwegian dialect data

Abstract

A B S T R A C TThe Levenshtein dialect distance method has proven to be a successful method for measuring phonetic distances between Dutch dialects. The aim of the present investigation is to validate the Levenshtein dialect distance with perceptual data from a language area other than the Dutch, namely Norway. We calculate the correlation between the Levenshtein distances and the distances between 15 Norwegian dialects as judged by Norwegian listeners. We carry out this analysis to see the degree to which the average Levenshtein distances correspond to the psychoacoustic perception of the speakers of the dialects.The present article reports on part of a study supported by NWO, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. We are grateful for the permission from Kristian Skarbø and Jørn Almberg to use their material and for the help of Jørn Almberg during the whole investigation. We thank Saakje van Dellen for her obliging help with the data entry and Peter Kleiweg for letting us use the programs that he developed for the visualization of the maps and dendrograms in this article. Finally, we would like to thank John Nerbonne for valuable comments and for correcting our English.

The educational consequences of language proficiency for young children

“…There are just a few studies to which we can compare the Dutch dialect distances. 14 Gooskens and Heeringa (2004) compare 15 Norwegian dialects using 58 words and calculating percentage differences between dialects as in Van Bezooijen and Heeringa (2006). Gooskens and Heeringa (2004) find the smallest difference between two dialects of 14.4 and the largest difference as 41.7.…”

“…14 Gooskens and Heeringa (2004) compare 15 Norwegian dialects using 58 words and calculating percentage differences between dialects as in Van Bezooijen and Heeringa (2006). Gooskens and Heeringa (2004) find the smallest difference between two dialects of 14.4 and the largest difference as 41.7. Nerbonne et al (1996) study the differences between 18 Dutch dialects from various parts of the Netherlands comparing the pronunciation of 100 words.…”

“…Valls et al (2012) study Catalan dialects using the Levenshtein language distance. Gooskens and Heeringa (2004) did the same for Norwegian dialects and Wieling et al (2014) for Tuscan dialects.…”

Afrikaans and Dutch as Closely-Related Languages: A Comparison to West Germanic Languages and Dutch Dialects

“…As previously mentioned, pronunciation differences are measured with the Levenshtein distance which was first applied by Kessler (1995) Bolognesi and Heeringa (2002), to Norwegian by Gooskens and Heeringa (2004), to German by Nerbonne and Siedle (2005), to Bantu by Alewijnse, Nerbonne, Van der Veen and Manni (2007), to Bulgarian by Heeringa, Nerbonne and Osenova (2010) and to American English by Nerbonne (2015). The Levenshtein distance corresponds to the distance between the transcriptions of two pronunciations of the same concept corresponding to two different varieties.…”

Holistic corpus-based dialectology

“…Using a trigonometry formula on the FRED county coordinates, it is computationally trivial to calculate pair wise as-the-crow-flies distances. A proxy for the likelihood of social contact, as-the-crow-flies distance is the most popular geographic distance measure in the dialectometry literature (for example, GOEBL, 2001;GOOSKENS;SHACKLETON, 2007). …”