Dorin UritescuResearcher: Dr. Dorin Uritescu, Department of French Studies, Glendon, York University.

Research Questions: (1) How do you put a linguistic atlas online and make the data available for an interactive digital analysis? (2) What characteristics of the geolinguistic variation could one discover when the linguistic data is analysed digitally?

Methodology: Interviews to gather linguistic data on North-Western Romanian dialects. Development of a program to digitally display and interactively analyse the data.

Results and Conclusions: While traditional analysis had to limit itself to differences in order to define the dialect units, with a computer program it is possible to integrate the differences into the common basis. Using statistical methods such as multidimensional scaling, one can objectively calculate the linguistic distance between dialects and reveal the multi-level nature of geolinguistic variation.

Dissemination of Results: The Romanian Online Dialect Atlas is publicly available here. In addition to many articles, chapters and several books, Dr. Uritescu has also published two volumes of a printed Romanian linguistic atlas: Noul Atlas lingvistic român. Crisana /The New Romanian Linguistic Atlas. Crisana. Three more volumes are expected in the future.

Impact on the Discipline: Linguists from different research fields now have a powerful tool for analysing large amounts of raw and/or interpreted linguistic data and can combine complex variables in new ways that were not previously possible.

Impact on Society and Potential Users: This research gives insight into the nature of language variation and change using data from Romanian dialects. It also helps understanding two of the functions of language: social integration and social identity.

Other Involved Parties: Sheila Embleton, Eric Wheeler, SSHRC

Keywords: linguistics, atlas, dialects, Romanian, variation, geolinguistics, dialectometry, language typology