Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Nordeuropa-Institut

The medieval Norse corpus of manuscripts provides valuable and rich data on geographic and chronological linguistic variation in the medieval Norse speaking world, however detecting and accurately measuring sound patterns and sound changes in medieval written texts is particularly challenging. In this talk, I present a pilot study demonstrating novel corpus linguistic methods for collecting, measuring, visualising and analysing changes and variation in Old Norse sound patterns in five digitised 13th-century Norwegian manuscripts. This study reveals coherent trajectories in vocalic changes in Old Norwegian dialects and illustrates a clear methodology for measuring segmental phonological changes in historical corpora.