Sources
Help build the largest human-edited directory on the web.
Submit a site - Become an editor
Wikipedia. Licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Are you an expert in this subject? Join the discussion and share your knowledge at Wikipedia.org.
Isogloss
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
An isogloss is the geographical boundary of a certain linguistic feature, e.g. the pronunciation of a vowel, the meaning of a word, or use of some syntactic feature. Major dialects are typically demarcated by whole bundles of isoglosses, e.g. the Benrath line that distinguishes High German from the other West Germanic languages; or the La Spezia-Rimini Line which divides the eastern Romance languages from the western ones. Undoubtedly, the largest well-known isogloss is the Centum-Satem isogloss, which traditionally separates the Indo-European languages into two distinct categories.
The name is inspired by contour lines or isopleths such as isobar, etc.; however, the isogloss separates rather than connects points of equal language (perhaps one could say it connects points of indefinite language).
- An example of an isogloss in Southern England.
- Beyond the Isogloss: The Isograph in Dialect Topography: A discussion of the shortcomings and oversimplifications of using isoglosses.
- On Some Acoustic Correlates of Isoglossy, a humorous analysis of Russian isoglossy.
 |
This linguistics article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |