Measuring the lexical distance between registers in national varieties of dutch

Abstract

From a lectometric point-of-view, distances between language varieties can be quantified by means of aggregating the dissimilarity in the behavior of linguistic characteristics. Given the fact that Dutch has evolved to become a pluricentric language, a sociolectometric approach can be applied to measure the distance between varieties of Dutch. The current paper builds upon Geeraerts et al. (1999) and Speelman et al. (2003) to measure these distances. Just like Geeraerts et al. (1999), we adopt a focus on lexical variation. We compare two ways of measuring this lexical distance, extending the work of Speelman et al. (2003).