Euclide, the crow, the wolf and the pedestrian: distance metrics for linguistic typology

Abstract

It is common for people working on linguistic geography, language contact and typology to make use of some type of distance metric between lects. However, most work so far has either used Euclidean distances, or geodesic distance, both of which do not represent the real separation between communities very accurately. This paper presents two datasets: one on walking distances and one on topographic distances between over 8700 lects across all macro-areas. We calculated walking distances using Open Street Maps data, and topographic distances using digital elevation data. We evaluate these distances. We evaluate these distance metrics on three case studies and show that topographic distance tends to outperform the other distance metrics, but geodesic distances can be used as an adequate approximation in some cases.