Korpuspõhine kvantitatiivne dialektoloogia
Corpus-based quantitative dialectology

Summary/Abstract: The article gives an overview of the directions and trends in dialectology with an emphasis on Estonian dialectology. We compare different methods and approaches for studying local language varieties: traditional dialectology based on the historical-comparative method, atlas-based dialectology, variation studies which stem from variationist sociolinguistics, and corpus-based approaches, which have been gaining momentum in recent years thanks to the compilation and development of the Estonian Dialect Corpus. In the article, we give an overview of the type of data and methods these approaches use. While traditional dialectology collected abundant qualitative data, which were based on texts and questionnaires, in order to compile dialect descriptions, dictionaries and atlases, newer, corpus-based methods use frequency data obtained from the corpus for comparing the dialects, model­ing the variation, and examining aggregate distributions of linguistic phenomena in the corpus. The latter means comparing dialects and their linguistic distances on the basis of analysing the distributions of many linguistic features. The methodology used in corpus-based quantitative dialectology is rich and constantly developing, enabling the researcher to account for more and more aspects underlying linguistic variation.

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