The State of the Art in Linguistic Cartography

In order to offer an overview of the state of the art in linguistic cartography, this article presents recent advances in the field. Whereas traditional dialectology was the main field of application for linguistic cartography in the twentieth century, the new cartographic forms presented here are a result of the introduction of methods and approaches from fields such as theoretical linguistics (e.g., generative grammar), sociolinguistics, statistics and geoinformatics. The combination of data and methods from various disciplines has proved fruitful, usually for all of the disciplines involved in the exchange. It is important to point out that new cartographic methods allow new perspectives even on old data, as will be exemplified here, particularly with aggregate and dialectometric mappings and the DiWA system. One of the aims of this contribution to the Nordic Dialectology Meeting is to extend the invitation to apply these new methods to the impressive amount of data collected by generations of dialectologists, so as to reaffirm for these data the scientific value they continue to deserve, today and in the future.