Title of the article

4.Measuring distances between varieties

In 1995 Kessler introduced the use of the Levenshtein distance as tool for measuring linguistic distances between language varieties. The Levenshtein distance is a string edit distance measure and Kessler applied this algorithm to the comparison of Irish dialects. Later on, this approach was applied by Nerbonne, Heeringa, Van den Hout, Van der Kooi, Otten, and Van de Vis (1996) to Dutch dialects. They assumed that distances between all possible pairs of segments are the same. E.g. the distance between an [] and an [e] is the same as the distance between the [] and []. Both Kessler (1995) and Nerbonne and Heeringa (1997) also experimented with more refined versions of the Levenshtein algorithm in which gradual segment distances were used which were found on the basis of the feature systems of Hoppenbrouwers (1988) and Vieregge et. al. (1984).

In this paper we use an implementation of the Levenshtein distance in which sound distances are used which are found by comparing spectrograms. In Section 4.1 we account for the use of spectral distances and explain how we calculate them. Comparisons are made on the basis of the audiotape The Sounds of the International Phonetic Alphabet (Wells and House, 1995). In Section 4.2 we describe the Levenshtein distance and explain how spectral distances can be used in this algorithm.