2015 AAAS Annual Meeting (12-16 February 2015)

February 12 - 16, 2015

Visualizing Verbal Culture: Seeing Language Diversity

As linguistics deals with an increasing amount of data, automatic analysis and visualization gain importance. This session focuses on linguistic diversity, including geographic and social dialects, but also attends to its relations to language history and the language of social media. From a broad perspective, language variation is influenced by areal contact and history (omitting typological influences). Studying areal influences, dialectology has turned to analyzing aggregate superficial differences in speech varieties extracted automatically and analyzed statistically and explored graphically using visual analytics including dendrograms, small multiples, self-organizing maps, geographic maps colored using multidimensional scaling, and sunburst visualizations. Together, these indicate the form of geographic influence, resulting in distinct areas or in continua. New developments in statistics also allow the comparison of geographic, social, and linguistic influences in unified models. The aggregate analysis is accompanied by the identification of characteristic features. Historical linguistics seeks shared innovations among languages, adding a temporal dimension. This session includes the language of social media and the variation displayed because it offers a temporally fine-grained view of the patterns of diffusion, and the view that language variation is gradually being "leveled" out of existence.