Dialectometrische verkenningen van het taallandschap in Fryslân

Abstract

The linguistic landscape in the province of Friesland is characterized by a rich diversity of language varieties: Frisian, peripheral Frisian, Frisian-Dutch contact varieties, and Low Saxon. There is often consensus about this in the literature. Within Frisian, a distinction is again made between Clay Frisian, Wood Frisian and Southwest Frisian. However, there is no consensus about an area in the northeast of the province that is referred to as North clay Frisian: does this belong to Clay Frisian, Wood Frisian, or is it an area in itself? In the 1980s Klaas van der Veen published a dialectometric study. Based on high-frequency words from various sources, he calculated distances between local Frisian varieties using Jean Séguy's method. He weighted the words he used by their frequency of use. Based on the distances, he made a classification of the Frisian dialects and found that North Clay Frisian belongs to Clay Frisian. We compared his analysis with two of our own analyses. In the first analysis we measured lexical distances using Jean Ségey's method as well, and in the second analysis we measured distances in the sound components using PMI Levenshtein distance. Our measurements were based on a random selection of words from the texts in the Reeks Nederlandse Dialectatlassen (RND). The well-known threefold division within Frisian was not found on the basis of the lexical measurements, but on the basis of the distances in the sound components we did find this division, and with North Clay Frisian forming a group with Wood Frisian. The differences between our results and Van der Veen's results are mainly determined by the choice of sources (a mix of different sources versus only the RND) and the choice of words (only high-frequency words versus a random selection from a fairly representative text).