Norwegian Dialect Distances Geographically Explained

1. Introduction In traditional dialectology, dialect variation is often represented by areas within which similar dialects are spoken. The dialect areas are found by drawing dividing lines (isoglosses) between areas where different representations are found for selected linguistic variables. However, different isoglosses do not always coincide which makes it difficult to draw borders between the dialect areas. Furthermore, speech variation mostly ranges along a continuum rather than being geographically abrupt. Generally, geographically remote areas are linguistically less similar than geographically close areas so that a high correlation can be expected between linguistic distance and geographic distance.