Bhasacitra: Visualising the dialect geography of South Asia
This provides a new interactive tool for linguists studying South Asian languages, though it is incremental as it builds on existing linguistic data.
The researchers tackled the problem of visualizing dialect geography in South Asia by developing Bhasacitra, a dialect mapping system based on a database of linguistic studies, resulting in an interactive tool for feature mapping and bibliography.
We present Bhasacitra, a dialect mapping system for South Asia built on a database of linguistic studies of languages of the region annotated for topic and location data. We analyse language coverage and look towards applications to typology by visualising example datasets. The application is not only meant to be useful for feature mapping, but also serves as a new kind of interactive bibliography for linguists of South Asian languages.