Institute of Mathematics and Informatics Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
Citation:
Serdica Journal of Computing, Vol. 3, No 3, (2009), 269p-298p
Abstract:
The paper presents a computational analysis of Bulgarian dialect variation, concentrating on pronunciation differences. It describes the
phonetic data set compiled during the project* ‘Measuring Linguistic Unity
and Diversity in Europe’ that consists of the pronunciations of 157 words
collected at 197 sites from all over Bulgaria. We also present the results of analyzing this data set using various quantitative methods and compare them
to the traditional scholarship on Bulgarian dialects. The results have shown
that various dialectometrical techniques clearly identify east-west division of
the country along the ‘jat’ border, as well as the third group of varieties in
the Rodopi area. The rest of the groups specified in the traditional atlases
either were not confirmed or were confirmed with a low confidence.
