A GIS-BASED APPLICATION FOR DOCUMENTING AND ANALYSING PERCEPTIONS ABOUT LANGUAGE VARIATION

This article presents PDMapping, a new tool developed to assist the collecting and processing of data in research projects in Perceptual Dialectology. It allows information to be stored in a structured database and processed easily using either quantitative analysis-based statistical software or Geographic Information Systems (GIS). After presenting the background for development of PDMapping, we will explain how it works, show examples of it in use and provide some useful tips for using the application in other perceptual dialectology projects. Although specifically designed for an ongoing study based on a dialect identification task, PDMapping is easily adapted to other perceptual dialectology studies. The tool is available to the research community in an open source code repository and also in a demonstration web version on the project’s website.