A dialectometric approach to Modern Breton dialect data: an opportunity to shed light on its origins and historical evolution

Studies on linguistic diversification are mainly based on large databases, in which internal or dialectal variation is often not taken into account. In this work, we intend to focus on one language, Breton, to observe how diversification operates at the level of vernacular varieties. To achieve this, we have applied a dialectometric approach to data taken from the Nouvel Atlas linguistique de la Basse-Bretagne (Le Dû 2001) and analyzed the patterns present in the distribution of linguistic distance across the dialectal network. The results reveal multiple temporal layers that echo the period of the emergence of new Brittonic dialects in the early Middle Ages.