Traveling time as a predictor of linguistic distance

The aim of the present investigation was to get an impression of the geographic influences on the dialectal variation in a country. In previous investigations, the correlations between linguistic distances and geographic distances using dialect data from the Netherlands and Norway were calculated (Gooskens and Heeringa 2004, Nerbonne et al. 1996). The results showed a high correlation in the case of Dutch data while the correlation was considerably lower in the case of Norwegian data. This seems to reflect the fact that especially for Norway the direct distance between two settlements does not reflect the difficulty of travel and therefore social contact, which is expected to play a role in keeping linguistic distance within limits. Holland is a country with a flat, regularly populated landscape with few natural obstacles such as mountains and rivers. This is in great contrast with Norway with its high mountains and many fjords which made it quite difficult to travel between places, especially in the past. These differences in geographical situations are clearly reflected in the correlations between the linguistic and geographical distances between the dialects of the two countries. The present investigation is searching for more successful ways of predicting linguistic distances by means of geographic distances in Norway. To this end, old and new traveling data were used providing information about traveling times by road, train, and boat between the places where the different dialects are spoken. The results show that a large part of the linguistic variation can be accounted for by geography in Norway, just as in the Netherlands. However, in the case of a geographically more compli_________________________ 1 This article is based on a paper read at the Second International Conference on Language Variation in Europe, Uppsala, 12‒14 June 2003. The author wishes to thank the following people for their help at different stages in the investigation: Dag Bjørnland (BI Norwegian School of Management) for providing the data on old travelling times, Femke Jongerius (University of Groningen) for data entering, Wilbert Heeringa (University of Groningen) for help with the Levenshtein distances and statistics and for making the maps, Peter Kleiweg (University of Groningen) for his software for creating the maps and John Nerbonne (University of Groningen) for comments on an earlier version of this paper. Traveling time as a predictor of linguistic distance 39 cated country like Norway, traveling times reflect the influence of geography on linguistic variation better than straight-line distances if the historical aspect is also taken into consideration since the old traveling circumstances are reflected in the modern dialects. Traveling times can vary independently from straight-line distances, and this variation was more pronounced in the past, when the present dialect situation crystallized.