3/ Now for a quick crash course in linguistics:
There are many branches, but for today, it’ll be helpful to understand the following in a bit more detail:
• Dialectology - the study of subsets of language (dialects) ex: Scouse English, Bavarian German
• Phonetics - the study of sounds of speech - cat vs chat, ik vs ich
• Sociolinguistics - the study of how social factors (i.e. age, class) impact speech
These, of course, are not official definitions of these terms!
Each of the maps in a linguistic atlas will explore the distribution of a different variant (a sound, a word, a phrase) using a sequence of points on a map
An isogloss is like a variant boundary. It’s a line drawn on the map to show where a linguistic variant is found.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isogloss
When several of these lines intersect, you can consider it a dialect boundary. I.e. all these features together are what give you a specific dialect like , for example.
#geoweirdness