PosterPDF Available

PDMapping: a web application for processing perceptual dialectology data

September 2018

DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.10263.83364

Conference: Second International Conference on Sociolinguistics. Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, 6-8 September 2018.

Authors:

University of Santiago de Compostela

The study of how nonlinguists perceive variation in language permits an analysis of subconscious linguistic ideologies. Since the emergence of Perceptual Dialectology (PD), dialectologists and sociolinguists have been using different methodological approaches to register language perceptions. These procedures include questionnaires to evaluate the similarity, the difference, the correctness or the pleasantness of varieties using scales, hand-drawn maps, interviews to elicit information and collect qualitative data, among other indirect methods like matched-guise technique. All these methods have been developed to make relationship between perception and production more explicit. This poster presents a web application developed in order to facilitate PD data processing and analysis. It was designed by an interdisciplinary group of computer scientists, mathematicians and linguists. The application, which mixes different PD techniques such as draw-a-map, dialect identification and a questionnaire to recover speakers’ dialectal perceptions, is especially useful as a complement to more traditional methods of data collection. The information is stored in a PostgreSQL database, which relational structure facilitates the management of data. In this way, the database can be connected with geographic information systems (GIS) and statistical software packages as R project.

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