Sprachraumanalyse mit Hilfe einer phonetischen Ontologie

This thesis describes a quantitative analysis of a language area based on an ontology. It utilizes the digitized data of The Linguistic Atlas of the Middle Rhine (MRhSA), which was made available by the REDE project. An Ontology (phonOntology) was developed to further enrich the IPA-annotated observations of the atlas by breaking down each sound into its sound-properties. This is possible due the inference capabilities of the ontology, thus allowing for the creation of quantitative datasets that contain representative feature vectors for each place covered by the MRhSA. The study starts with a comprehensive dataset including all of the observations for an older generation of speakers interviewed during the field work for the MRhSA. In the next step, subsets of these are extracted on the basis of which datasets associated with the Middle High German and West Germanic reference systems are generated. These datasets are first analyzed via clustering algorithms and then evaluated based on different stability metrics. The results show a structural difference between the northern region called Moselle Franconian and the southern region called Rhine Franconian. This difference is not bound to specific isoglosses, but can be found within the sound properties themselves. It is possible to conduct an apparent-time analysis because the MRhSA also offers a second dataset that takes a second generation of younger speakers into account. The results of this analysis show that the structural difference is still in place; however, there are measurable normalization tendencies between these dialects, which may be attributable to a closer approximation to Standard German.