Spatial-temporal modeling of linguistic regions and processes with combined indeterminate and crisp boundaries

Abstract

The paper elaborates on the spatial-temporal modeling of linguistic and dialect phenomena. Language Geography—a branch of Human Geography—tries to enhance the visual exploration of linguistic data, and utilizes a number of methodologies from GIScience, whereas publications focusing on analyzing linguistic data in GIScience are hard to find. This research work highlights the representation of language and/or dialect regions with combined indeterminate and crisp boundaries—i.e. frontiers and borders. Both boundary “types” are necessary in order to model the spatial-temporal dynamics of language phenomena. The article analyzes the emerging, ending, moving and merging of linguistic/dialect regions and phenomena with respect to space and time and the boundary types. In order to represent frontiers or indeterminate boundaries, fuzzy logic is employed.