Unity in Diversity?: A Fine-Grained Approach to Linguistic Geography of Breton by Means of Dialectometry

Abstract

Local variation in Breton is a well known feature but aggregate analyses on this topic are still rare. A dialectometric approach, i.e. a computational method for comparing data from the different locations of a linguistic atlas, applied to the Nouvel Atlas Linguistique de la Basse-Bretagne (Le Dû 2001) but restrained to a small area at the center of the Lower-Brittany has identified a few phenomena involved in linguistic variation and has quantified their importance. We discuss these results in the light of the frequency of these facts for each site. This approach is an opportunity to associate basic corpus approach to linguistic geography for a better understanding of linguistic variation.