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This paper takes a quantitative perspective on data from the project Syntax hessischer Dialekte (SyHD), covering dialects in the German state of Hesse, an area with rich dialectal variation. Many previous dialectometric analyses abstracted away from intralocal variation (e.g., by only counting the most frequent variant at a location). In contrast, we do justice to intralocal variation by taking into account local frequency relations. The study shows that the border between Low German and Central German—one of the most important isoglosses in German dialectology—is not relevant for syntactic phenomena. At the same time, a comparison with character n-grams (a global measure of string similarity) reveals that the traditionally assumed dialect areas, primarily defined according to phonological developments, are still present in the twenty-first century data. Different from previous studies, our results are obtained from a uniform data base. Therefore, the differences between syntax and phonology cannot be due to variation in sampling, elicitation method, or time of elicitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a comparison of a passage from the New Testament (Luke 2:1–2:20), we explore diachronic developments and areal distributions of agreement in Germanic quantitatively by taking into account 33 different Bible versions, spanning from Wulfila's Gothic version to all modern standard languages and selected dialects. This allows us to establish a thorough typological profile of agreement and its differing developments in Germanic. Our method involves a quantification of all agreement relations, allowing for precise comparisons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

North Frisian is well-known for its small-scale variation and the traditional classification found in Århammar (1968) assumes as many as ten dialect groups within a small area. Until this day, however, a dialect classification based on quantitative methods is lacking and the criteria for the traditional classification are also far from clear. In order to address this problem, the paper uses parallel text material (the questionnaires from Georg Wenker's "Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reichs") and character n-grams (trigrams). Applying cosine distance to the trigram inventories of 55 North Frisian questionnaires, the paper employs several dimension reduction techniques, e. g. multidimensional scaling, Neighbor-Net and hierarchical cluster analysis and compares the results with the traditional classification. While the latter can be confirmed to a large extent, the distinctions within Southern Mainland North Frisian seem to be less clear. Using an association measure (log-likelihood), prominent features are extracted for the six main dialect groups that emerge on basis of the aggregated data. Finally, the paper discusses the quality of the North Frisian Wenker questionnaires in the light of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]