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Which county in Pennsylvania has the most divergent dialect? |
The site furthest away from all other sites in the MDS plot is Lebanon.
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Look at the three-dimensional MDS map of Pennsylvania. Are there any abrupt dialect borders? Are there transitional borders? Can clear dialect groups be identified? |
The green area in the south-east forms a clear dialect group. The rest of Pennsylvania can roughly be divided into East, West and North, with gradual transitions between the areas.
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Compare the MDS map to the reference point map of the place Huntingdon. What do the two different methods of visualizing dialect differences tell about dialects? |
In the reference point map of the place Huntingdon we can see that the dialects in central Pennsylvania, close to Huntingdon, are very similar to the dialect of Huntingdon. Places in the west and in the north of Pennsylvania all have a quite similar shade of blue, indicating intermediate linguistic distances to Huntingdon.
Similarly to the reference point map, the MDS map shows that central Pennsylvanian dialects are similar to each other. But in the MDS map we can also see that western and northern Pennsylvanian dialects are actually very different from each other even though they are about equally different from the central Pennsylvanian dialects.
While the reference point map shows the view of someone standing in Huntingdon listening to the other Pennsylvanian dialects, the perspective of the MDS map is more that of an “objective observer” who is trying to hear all the difference between Pennsylvanian dialects.