This article provides a brief introduction to the problems and methods of dialectometry (fr. “dialectométrie”, ger. “Dialektometrie”), such as it is practiced in Salzburg. Introduced in 1973 by Jean Séguy, we use the term “dialectométrie” to refer to the global analysis of the geolinguistic deep structures of the data from a given linguistic atlas, using mathematical und visual methods borrowed from statistics, numerical classification and modern computer assisted quantitative cartography. Taking the results of a dialectometric analysis (“dialectometrization”) of the French linguistic atlas ALF (“Atlas linguistique de la France”, published by Jules Gilliéron and Edmond Edmont between 1902 and 1910) as an example, our article examines the different steps involved in a complete dialectometrization – according to the Salzburg standards – of the original maps of the ALF, from the establishment of the data matrix and the subsequent quantitative measuring of the linguistic similarities (and distances) between the 641 inquiry points on the ALF grid to the computer-aided visualization of the respective numerical results. We present the following dialectometric analyses in brief: similarity maps, parameter maps, interpoint maps (honeycomb and beam maps), correlation maps and dendrographic schemes (trees). Our article is accompanied by two explicative figures in black and white and 12 coloured choropleth and isarithmic maps which have been produced using the computer program VDM (“Visual DialectoMetry”) created and tested in Salzburg by our research assistant Edgar Haimerl between 1997 and 2000.
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