Revisiting the classification of Gallo-Italic: a dialectometric approach

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While Gallo-Italic varieties clearly belong to the Romance language family, their
subgrouping as either Gallo-Romance or Italo-Romance has been the source of disagreement in the classificatory literature. While earlier analyses tended to classify Gallo-Italic as Gallo-Romance (notably Schmid, 1956; Bec, 1970-1971), later work has either argued for or tacitly assumed a classification of Gallo-Italic as part of the Italo-Romance branch, a view that is both different from as well as irreconcilable with the earlier Gallo-Romance classifications. In this paper we aim to contribute to the development of an empirically-based classification
of Gallo-Italic through the use of dialectometry applied to atlas corpora, and specifically through the measurement of Levenshtein distance. Using three wordlists (Swadesh 100, Swadesh 200, Leipzig-Jakarta) and comparing twenty-six linguistic varieties across Italy and south-eastern France, we show that Gallo-Italic is best classified as a third subgroup within the Gallo-Romance branch. Our results also clearly identify all the major bundles of isoglosses established through traditional dialectological methods and confirm Gallo-Italic as a relatively homogenous group distinct from Italo-Romance.

Keywords

  • Gallo-Italic, dialectometry, Levenshtein, Gallo-Romance, Italo-Romance, lexicostatistics
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)442-455
JournalDigital Scholarship in the Humanities
Volume33
Issue number2
Early online date24 Aug 2017
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Jun 2018

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