The Romanian linguistic cartography in the digitizing era: the electronic atlases

Abstract

Abstract The three series of national linguistic atlases (WLAD, ALR and NALR) proof that the Romanian linguistic cartography has one of the richest and most important traditions in Europe, fact acknowledged by the linguistic community starting from the first half of the last century. This tradition continues nowadays with the digitization of the linguistic atlases. The first achievement in this direction is the release in 2007 of the third volume from series NALR. Moldavia and Bukovina with the help of bespoke software built in collaboration by linguists and computer scientists from Iasi Branch of the Romanian Academy. Another project in the same field, done by a Romanian-Canadian team, is the Online Romanian Dialect Atlas which plans to build an interactive database for dialects using a multidimensional scaling statistical technique. The Bukovina Audiovisual Linguistic Atlas (ALAB) is the most recent project for a digital atlas of the Romanian academic community and it is based in the research centre from Iasi. The ALAB project, started in 2010, plans to build, for the first time in Romania, an audio-video atlas centred on sociolinguistic features. This atlas will present, with the help of online support in one interface, diatopic, diastratic (diasexual and diagenerational), and possible diaphasic variations on dialect level.