Mapping dialectal variation using the Algonquian Linguistic Atlas

• Main Authors: Cenerini, Chantale, Junker, Marie-Odile, Kesselman, Stephen, Rosen, Nicole
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: Canada; Valentine; Maliseet; Mi’kmaw; naskapi
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10125/42004

The Algonquian Linguistic Atlas (URL: www.ling-atlas.ca), a collaborative project started in 2005 (Co-author et al. 2005), is an online multimedia linguistic atlas of Algonquian languages across Canada. It includes data primarily from the Cree-Innu- Naskapi continuum, but also from Mi’kmaw, Ojibwe, Blackfoot, Algonquin, Mitchif, Oji-Cree, and Maliseet, collected from 2002 to the present, including 42 communities from Alberta to Labrador. In this multimedia presentation we show how data previously gathered for the Atlas for pedagogical purposes can be (re-)used to for a bottom-up linguistic study of dialectal boundaries and degree of relatedness of neighbouring languages. The questionnaire includes the elicitation of single words and phrases categorized into 21 themes, such as greetings, kinship terms, days of the week, weather, orders and requests, and hunting. Although the data collected was initially only conversation-based, the questionnaire was later enriched to elicitate and verify patterns of dialectal variation. Using this data and previous smaller-scale dialectal work as a reference, (MacKenzie (1980), Valentine (1995), Béland (1979) and Drapeau (1979)), we identified 114 distinct variable phonological, lexical, grammatical, syntactic and semantic features which were analyzed for each community across the country. The realizations or variants for each feature were coded in each community, creating isogloss maps based on data collected, to be available via the online interface. These individual feature maps are then compared and compiled in R (R Core Team, 2013; Wikham, H. 2009; Wikham, H. et. al, 2016) to reveal the isogloss bundles drawn from the Atlas data. We will demonstrate the usefulness of this bottom-up approach by discussing a few isogloss bundles found. First, an isogloss bundle is confirmed between dialects of Cree-Innu-Naskapi which undergo palatalization, versus those who do not (also attested in MacKenzie 1980). Our findings also show an isogloss bundle at the Manitoba-Ontario border of ...