Quantitative Social Dialectology: Explaining Linguistic Variation Geographically and Socially
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this study we examine linguistic variation and its dependence on both social and geographic factors. We follow dialectometry in applying a quantitative methodology and focusing on dialect distances, and social dialectology in the choice of factors we examine in building a model to predict word pronunciation distances from the standard Dutch language to 424 Dutch dialects. We combine linear mixed-effects regression modeling with generalized additive modeling to predict the pronunciation distance of 559 words. Although geographical position is the dominant predictor, several other factors emerged as significant. The model predicts a greater distance from the standard for smaller communities, for communities with a higher average age, for nouns (as contrasted with verbs and adjectives), for more frequent words, and for words with relatively many vowels. The impact of the demographic variables, however, varied from word to word. For a majority of words, larger, richer and younger communities are moving towards the standard. For a smaller minority of words, larger, richer and younger communities emerge as driving a change away from the standard. Similarly, the strength of the effects of word frequency and word category varied geographically. The peripheral areas of the Netherlands showed a greater distance from the standard for nouns (as opposed to verbs and adjectives) as well as for high-frequency words, compared to the more central areas. Our findings indicate that changes in pronunciation have been spreading (in particular for low-frequency words) from the Hollandic center of economic power to the peripheral areas of the country, meeting resistance that is stronger wherever, for well-documented historical reasons, the political influence of Holland was reduced. Our results are also consistent with the theory of lexical diffusion, in that distances from the Hollandic norm vary systematically and predictably on a word by word basis.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it