A dialectometric approach to inner Asia Minor Greek: Comparisons and associations between linguistic levels

Abstract

Abstract Even though dialectometric approaches have significantly contributed to the development of dialectology in the last few decades, no relevant analyses have ever been performed on Modern Greek dialects. This article attempts to fill this gap by using dialectometric techniques to measure the degrees of association between aggregate morphological, phonological, and syntactic differences in nineteen varieties of inner Asia Minor Greek (i.e. of Cappadocian, Pharasiot, and Silliot). Our methods include correlations (between pairs of linguistic levels and between linguistic levels and geography) as well as multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis (of the whole dataset as well as of the linguistic levels), which allow us, on the one hand, to draw conclusions about the associations of linguistic levels and the distributions of dialects and, on the other hand, to directly compare our results to those coming from previous dialectometric studies and Greek dialectology. Results show that, although the complete dataset, phonology, and morphology yield—in some instances—similar patterns (i.e. high correlations between them as well as with geography, high agreement of dialect classifications), the level of syntax deviates the most, which is interpreted as a tendency to form larger dialect areas. Our findings are consistent with patterns found in earlier large-scale studies in dialectometry, but they only partially confirm the classifications of Greek dialectology.