Perception of geographically conditioned linguistic variation

Over the course of several decades, geographically conditioned linguistic variation in the Netherlands and the Dutch speaking part of Belgium has been investigated from many different perspectives. In our view, the various methodological approaches can be divided into two fundamentally different types. In the first type, data about the linguistic characteristics of dialects are usually gathered by means of questionnaires, sometimes on the basis of recordings of conversational speech, collecting information about what people actually say. The linguistic products, recorded in written or auditory form, are subsequently subjected to (simple or more complex) data analysis techniques. The final goal of such work is to draw a linguistically based map showing the distribution and boundaries of dialect features and dialect areas. Some of the more well-known examples of these 'objective' techniques include the construction and tracing of isoglosses and isogloss bundles (e.g. Weijnen 1941), feature frequency counts and correlations (Hoppenbrouwers and Hoppenbrouwers 2001) and the calculation of Levenshtein distances between matched segment strings (e.g. Heeringa 2004). These traditional-dialectological and computational techniques have been discussed elsewhere (see the contributions by Niebaum and Taeldeman, and by Heeringa and Nerbonne) in this book and will not be discussed here.