ANALYZING DIALECTOLOGICAL DISTRIBUTIONS OF JAPANESE

Classification characterizes the first era of Japanese geolinguistics. After then, Japanese geolinguists had concentrated to analyze each geographical distribution. They focused on the distances and the topographical features. In particular, the lines of transportations tended to be raised for the analyses. But other geographical information plays important roles in the analyses of dialectological distributions. The overlay of the dialectological distributions and the topographic maps would be ideal as research methodology; however the topographic maps include a number of features. Geographical Information System (GIS) enables us to treat much geographical information which was once too difficult and heavily complicated to handle. GIS-based comparison between the geographical data and the language data projects a completely new perspective. Geolinguistics is now in the stage to widen its orientation to general science. At the same time, geolinguistics can study the human beings through analyzing the dynamism of interaction between dialectological distributions and geographical information.