Dialectometry-Based Classification of

Central-Southern Italian Dialects

Antonio Sciarretta
April 2023

Abstract
This paper provides a new classification of Central-Southern Italian dialects us-
ing dialectometric methods. All varieties considered are analysed and cast in a
data set where homogeneous areas are evaluated according to a selected list of
phonetic features. Using numerical evaluation of these features and Manhattan
distance, a linguistic distance rule is defined. On this basis, the classification
problem is formulated as a clustering problem, and a k-means algorithm is used.
Additionally, an ad-hoc rule is set to identify transitional areas and silhouette
analysis is used to select the most appropriate number of clusters. While mean-
ingful results are obtained for each number of clusters, a nine-group classification
emerges as the most appropriate. As the results suggest, this classification is less
subjective, more precise, and more comprehensive than traditional ones based
on selected isoglosses.

1 Introduction
The standard classification of peninsular Italian dialects is that proposed by
G.B. Pellegrini [Pellegrini, 1977]. Within the Italo-Romance branch of the
Romance languages, the dialectal areas (systems) identified are: i) Tuscan,
ii) Central (Mediano), iii) Intermediate Southern, and iv) Extreme Southern.
Area i) largely corresponds to Tuscany. Area ii) comprises of four subareas
(Central Marchigiano in Central Marche, Umbrian, Latian in Central-Northern
Latium, and Cicolano-Sabino-Aquilano between Latium and the Abruzzi). Area
iii) is further subdivided into five subareas (Southern Marchigiano-Abruzzese,
Molisano, Apulian, Southern Latian-Campanian, Lucanian-Northern Calabrian).
Area iv) comprises of three subareas (Salentino, Central-Southern Calabrese,
and Sicilian). These subareas, largely inspired by the administrative regions
(Regioni ) of Italy, are further subdivided into sub-sub-areas Ia, Ib, etc., often
corresponding to a provincial (Provincia) level.
In SIL International’s Ethnologue database [Eberhard et al. 2022], upon
which ISO 693-3 is based, Italian (ita) is based on Pellegrini’s Tuscan and Cen-

1
tral, Napoletano-Calabrese (nap) is based on Pellegrini’s Intermediate Southern,
and Sicilian (scn) on Pellegrini’s Extreme Southern. UNESCO’s endangered lan-
guages list [Moseley, 2010] and the Glottolog database [Hammarström et al., 2022]
adopt a virtually identical classification, albeit with slight differences in naming,
even including some of Pellegrini’s subareas.
While Pellegrini’s primary classification is largely based on phonetic and
morphological isoglosses (up to 33 for the whole of Italy), the subarea classifica-
tion in Central-Southern Italy, particularly in the Intermediate Southern area,
does not follow this approach – only three isoglosses are completely included
within the boundaries of the area in question and have virtually no effect on
the definition of subareas – but is rather grounded on administrative subdivi-
sions. For example, the boundaries between Molisano and Southern Latian-
Campanian, or between the latter and Apulian, resp., Lucanian-Northern Cal-
abrian, largely reflect the administrative boundaries between the corresponding
regions.
The goal of this work is to investigate to which extent modern dialectometry
confirms this standard classification. Dialectometry [Séguy, 1973, Goebl, 1982]
aims at providing an objective view of dialect variation through the use of quan-
titative data analysis. In particular, dialectometric clustering has been applied
to several regions, including The Netherlands [Wieling & Nerbonne, 2011], Cat-
alonia [Valls et al., 2012], English dialects [Wieling et al., 2013]. In Italy, rele-
vant examples are mostly concerning Tuscany [Montemagni & Wieling, 2016],
[Calamai et al., 2022].
In these works, various clustering techniques have been applied mainly on the
basis of distance matrices, although other examples exist [Syrjanen et al., 2016].
Distance matrices collect the linguistic distances between any pair of N sites or
areas. Linguistic distance has been defined in several different ways.
One common procedure consists in considering categorical lexical data, that
is, M entries in a linguistic atlas, which may have up to P variants each. A
distance between two sites is then defined by counting the number of pair-
wise variant mismatches for all features. An example is the Relative Difference
Value (RDV), initially used as a difference function for unequivocal outcomes
of features [Goebl, 2010] and later adapted to cover features with multiple pos-
sible outcomes [Pickl, 2014]. A slightly modified metric, the Weighted Iden-
tity/difference Value (WIV), can use weights to emphasise some particular fea-
tures [Goebl, 1982]. This approach has been extended to variables/features
other than lexical, i.e., phonological rules [Valls et al., 2012].
Another approach considers individual word pronunciations, which are con-
verted in edit-distances between strings of characters, typically using one partic-
ular location as a reference. The most common edit distance used is Levenshtein
distance [Levenshtein, 1966], which describe the cost (number of elementary
operations) of changing one string into another or, equivalently, the character
mismatches when the string are opportunely aligned. More refined methods
with variable costs of substitutions (weights) also exist, such as the PMI-based
Levenshtein distance [Wieling et al., 2014]. Once normalized by the length of
alignment, the edit distances between m word pairs can be then aggregated

2
by taking their average [Heeringa, 2004], leading to the distance between two
varieties.
Once a distance matrix is obtained, several analyses can be performed, the
basic ones being beam maps, honeycomb maps, and cluster analysis. Among
clustering techniques, hierarchical clustering such as complete-linkage, UPGMA
or Ward’s has been more often used [Goebl, 2008]. Partitional clustering has
been somehow less used in dialectometry, although both k-means and k-medoid
clustering have been applied on different kinds of linguistic data [Hyvönen et al., 2007,
Burridge et al., 2019, Cheshire et al., 2011, Syrjanen et al., 2016].
Hierarchical clustering or k-medoid can be used directly once the distance
matrix is defined since these methods only need the distance metric between
the sites. On the contrary, k-means requires to evaluate the distance between
actual sites and iteratively updated centroids, which do not correspond to any
site, therefore preventing the use of pre-calculated distance matrices.
Dimensionality Reduction (DR) techniques try to reduce the number of vari-
ables while preserving the variation as much as possible. For instance, Bipar-
tite Spectral Graph Partitioning (BSGP) using Singular Value Decomposition
(SVD) has been used in [Wieling & Nerbonne, 2011, Montemagni & Wieling, 2016,
Wieling et al., 2013]. This technique uses a binary segment substitution matrix
(N × M ) with value Aij = 1 when segment substitution j occurs in variety i.
SVD is applied to produce a synthetic vector of size N + M , which is then pro-
cessed by k-means, in an attempt to simultaneously cluster sites and linguistic
features which give rise to the geographical clustering.
Other dimensionality reduction techniques such as Multidimensional Scaling,
Principal Component Analysis (PCA), or Factor Analysis [Pröll et al., 2014]
are usually used to discover indirectly latent clusters and dialect continua in
the data, e.g., by converting the distance matrix into a N × 3 matrix, then
attributing RGB values to rows and visualizing them on maps. However, these
DR techniques usually do not provide explicit clustering capability.
Recently, spatial Bayesian Clustering (BC) has been applied to linguistic
data by [Romano et al., 2022]. While hard clustering generates clear boundaries
between clusters and thus may fail to represent gradual variations in continuous
dialect data, in BC clustering is fuzzy: each point belongs to every cluster
with a certain probability. Bayesian clustering yields core regions where points
predominantly belong to a single cluster and gradual boundaries where points
belong to multiple clusters with almost equal probabilities.
The data used for clustering are generally the entries of linguistic atlases.
For the region under consideration, the web page of Salzburg dialectometry team
[Goebl et al., 2019] provides a classification based on the AIS [Jaberg & Jud, 1987]
data and two hierarchical clustering algorithms. However, Central-Southern
Italian dialects are classified alongside with other Italian dialects: even set-
ting the number of clusters to the maximum value available (20), only four-five
groups emerge in the region considered. Moreover, the results change dramati-
cally depending on the corpus considered, which is probably due to the relatively
low number of sites (N less than 100) in the corpus.
In this work, we try to consider all Central-Southern Italian varieties, that is,

3
more than a thousand communes in nine regions: The Marches (South of Esino
river), Umbria, Latium, Abruzzi, Molise, Campania, Apulia, Basilicata, and
Calabria. To obtain access to useful and homogeneous data, we select the most
relevant L phonetic features (selected according to three guiding principles)
instead of trying to gather a vocabulary of word entries. Then we apply k-
means clustering to points in an abstract L-dimensional space. Each point
represents a group of varieties that are homogeneous according to the selected
phonetic features and can be represented as strings of numerical values that
describe the outcomes of those features. Thanks to the relatively low dimension
of the dataset (N × L), clustering can be performed directly with the k-means
algorithm, without the need of dimensionality reduction techniques. Distance
can be calculated between any strings, also not representative of any variety,
e.g., the k-means centroids. We adopt the silhouette analysis to choose the most
appropriate number of clusters. Based on that, we propose a heuristic method
to define fuzzy or transitional areas across groups.

2 Method
Varieties are classified according to L = 18 phonetic traits, which are listed in
Table 1. These traits certainly represent a subset of the diatopic variation in
the area considered. Their choice has been made according to three guiding
principles:

• Being sufficiently compact in their areal distribution, thus avoiding the use
of possibly widespread but “darting” phenomena occurring here and there,
e.g., due to diachronic variation and the influence of standard Italian.
This criterion discarded, e.g., the propagation of /u/ in pre-tonic position
(Savoia & Baldi, 2016; Schirru, 2016) or the semivocalization of initial and
intervocalic /v/.
• Being sufficiently widespread, concerning at least two-three provinces. For
this reason, e.g., the palatalization of pre-tonic /a/, which concerns a pos-
sibly compact but limited area in Molise (Iannacito, 2002), was discarded.
• Being sufficiently identifiable, i.e., occurring in at least half a dozen words
that can be retrieved in common speech, written texts, or in the scien-
tific literature. For this reason, e.g., the different outcomes of -TJ- or
-BJ- (Carosella, 2016), occurring in a very few common words, have been
discarded.

4
 Table 1: Set of phonetic features considered and their possible
outcomes.

ℓ Phonetic trait – Outcomes Examples xℓ wℓ

1 Metaphony, given /-U/ ‘bed’ 0.5
Absent ["lEt:o] 0
Raising-type ["let:u] 1
Diphthonigization-type ["ljEt:@] 2
Monophthongization-type ["lit:@] 3
2 Metaphony, given /-I/ ‘good’ (pl.) 0.5
Absent ["bOno] 0
Raising-type ["bonu] 1
Diphthonigization-type ["bwOn@] 2
Monophthongization-type ["bun@] 3
3 Vocalic differentiation by position ‘thing’, ‘mouth’ 1
Absent ["kOsa], ["vOk:a] 0
Present (central-southern origin) ["kosa], ["vOk:a] 1
Present (northern origin) ["kosa], ["vok:a] -1
4 Word-final vowels ‘house’, ‘heart’, ‘eight’, 1
‘wolf’
Reduction of all (/@/) ["kas@], ["kOr@], ["Ot:@], 0
["lup@]
Conservation of -a, reduction of ["kasa], ["kOr@], ["Ot:@], 1
others (/a/, /@/) ["lup@]
Conservation of three (/a/, ["kasa], ["kOre]-["kOri], 2
/e/-/@/-/i/, /o/-/u/) or four vowels ["Ot:u], ["lupu]
(with /i/ distinct from /e/-/@/)
Conservation of all five vowels ["kasa], ["kOre], ["Ot:o], 3
(/a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/) ["lupu]
5 Alteration of -LL- ‘horse’ 1
Absent (/ll/) [ka"val:u] 0
Palatal (/j/, /L/, /J/) [ka"vaj:u] 1
Occlusive (/dd/) and retroflex [ka"vad:u] 2
6 Metaphony of -A- ‘hands’ 1
Absent ["man@] 0
Present ["min@] 1
7 Some groups of consonants + L ‘(it) rains’, ‘white’, 1
‘flower’
Standard (/pj/, /bj/, /fj/) ["pjov@], ["b:jang@], 0
["fjor@]
Alteration of /PL/ > /kj/ ["cov@], ["b:jang@], 1
["fjor@]
Further alteration of /BL/ > /j/ ["cov@], ["jang@], ["fjor@] 2
Further alteration of /FL/ > /S/, ["cov@], ["jang@], ["Sor@] 3
/x/ etc.

5
8 Apocope of -no, -ne ‘bread’, ‘wine’ 0.5
Absent ["pane], ["vino] 0
Only -ne ["pa], ["vino] 1
Both ["pa], ["vi] 2
9 Outcomes of -LJ- ‘son’ 1
Palatal (/L/) ["fiL@] 0
Approximant (/j/) ["fij@] 1
Occlusive (/é/) ["fié@] 2
10 Aspiration of -F- ‘coffee’ 1
Absent [ka"fe] 0
Present [ka"he] 1
11 Rhotacization of -D- ‘tooth’ 1
Absent ["dEnd@] 0
Present ["rEnd@] 1
12 Degemination of -RR- and other ‘ground’ 1
geminates
Absent ["tEr:a] 0
Present (of -rr-) ["tEra] 1
Present (of -rr- and others) ["tEra] 2
13 Postnasal sonorization of stops and ‘spring’, ‘when’ 1
progressive assimilation in groups
of /n/ + stops
Both present ["fonde], ["kwan:o] 0
Only assimilation ["fonte], ["kwan:o] 1
Both absent ["fonte], ["kwando] 2
14 “Florentine” Anaphonesis ‘tongue’ 1
Absent ["leNgwa] 0
Present ["liNgwa] 1
15 Some groups of consonants + J ‘arm’, ‘to eat’, ‘to go 1
out’
Standard (/Ù/, /ñ/, /j/) ["vraÙ:@], [ma"ñ:a], ["ji] 0
Alteration of /kj/ > /ţ/ ["vraţ:@], [ma"ñ:a], ["ji] 1
Further alteration of /ngj/ > /nÃ/ ["vraţ:@], [ma"nÃa], ["ji] 2
Further alteration of /j/ > /S/ ["vraţ:@], [ma"nÃa], ["Si] 3
16 Group R + J ‘baker’ 1
Central-southern /r/ [for"naro] 0
Tuscan /j/ [for"najo] 1
17 Group S + J ‘kiss’ 1
Postalveolar (/S/) ["vaS@] 0
Alveolar (/s/) ["vas@] 1
18 Tonic vowel system ‘snow’, ‘month’, ‘cross’ 1
Common Romance ["nev@], ["mes@], ["kroÙ@] 0
“Romanian” ["nev@], ["mes@], ["kruÙ@] 1
“Sardinian” ["niv@], ["mEs@], [’kruÙ@] 2

6
 “Sicilian” ["niv@], ["mis@], ["kruÙ@] 3

Traditionally, most of these features are associated with “isoglosses” that

have been used to define dialect groups or subgroups. For instance, pho-
netic trait 4 is the definitory isogloss that separates the Central dialects from
Intermediate-Southern dialects in the classification of Pellegrini.
All varieties in the geographical space considered have been inspected and
attributed a numerical value for each trait. Traits that have just two outcomes
can generate either a digit 0 (in general, absence of that trait) or 1 (presence).
Traits with multiple (P ) outcomes can generate digits ranging from 0 to P −
1 where 0 is generally attributed to the “most standard” outcome, and the
digit increases with the degree of deviation from this standard. The numerical
values of each outcome are equally listed in Table 1. In case of intermediate,
simultaneous, or uncertain outcomes, sometimes fractional values have been
used.
Resulting from this transcription, each dialect corresponds to a string of L
digits, {xℓ }L
1 . Varieties that are geographically adjacent and share the same
string are considered as equal and form a “homogeneous area” (HA) for the
purposes of this study. In the whole space, no less than N = 647 homogeneous
areas have been identified in this way: 111 in Latium, 101 in Calabria, 89 in the
Abruzzi, 83 in Campania, 79 in Basilicata, 76 in Apulia, 40 in Molise, 44 in the
Marches, 24 in Umbria. The localization of these areas is shown schematically
in Fig. 1. Their actual extension and the varieties included in each of them are
detailed in the companion web site.
Each homogeneous area represents one point in the data set used for the
classification. The metrics used is the Manhattan distance
X
Dij = wℓ |xiℓ − xjℓ |, (1)
ℓ

where | · | denotes the absolute value and w is a vector of weights. In this study,
wℓ is always 1 except for ℓ = {1, 2, 8} where w = 0.5 has been used, see Table
1. We note that this procedure is roughly equivalent to ‘count the isoglosses’
between two different locations.
Based on this metric, a k-means algorithm has been used to classify the
N L-dimensional points into K groups. This well-known algorithm tries to
attribute each point to one of the clusters by minimising the within-cluster sum
of Manhattan distances, that is,
K X X
X L
min wℓ |xiℓ − mkℓ |, (2)
k=1 xi ∈Ck ℓ=1

where the centroid mk is defined as the mean of points belonging to cluster k

(Ck ),
1 X
mk = xj . (3)
card(Ck )
xj ∈Ck

7
Figure 1: Localization of the homogeneous areas (circles). Each colour corre-
sponds to one of the administrative regions. Boundaries between regions are
drawn.

8
 In practice, the algorithm proceeds iteratively. First, a set of K means is
randomly generated. Then, each point is attributed to the cluster with the
‘nearest’ mean. Further, means are recalculated based on the points attributed
to each cluster. This process is repeated for T iterations. However, the algorithm
is not guaranteed to find the optimum, i.e., the clustering that minimizes the
objective in (2) [Russel & Norvig, 2020]. For this reason, the algorithm is run
for R times, each time with a different (random) initialization of the means.
For each run, the objective is calculated and finally the run with the minimal
objective is chosen as the result. For this study, the algorithm is parametrized
with T = 20 and R = 200K.
To choose the optimal number of clusters K, the silhouette analysis is used.
According to this method, a silhouette metric is defined as a function of the
number of clusters as  
bi − ai
σ(K) = (4)
max(ai , bi )
where ⟨·⟩ denotes the average over all points i, and
1 X 1 X
ai = Dij , bi = min Dij (5)
card(CI ) − 1 J̸=I card(CJ )
j∈CI ,j̸=i j∈CJ

are the mean distance between point i and all other points in the same cluster CI
and the smallest mean distance of i to all points in any other cluster, respectively.
The optimal number of clusters is chosen as to maximise the silhouette. The
silhouette coefficient SC = maxK σ(K) summarizes the final result.
It is common opinion that belonging to one particular dialectal group is not a
rigid attribute, but instead, transition bands exist. To retrieve this intuitive be-
haviour in a quantitative way, we have used the following method. We compute
the distance between each HA and the centroids of all clusters,
X
Dik = wℓ |xiℓ − mkℓ |. (6)
ℓ

The lowest distance corresponds by definition to the cluster k to which the

HA is member. If the difference between the second lowest distance (say, with
cluster h) and the lowest distance is less than a specified fraction of the lowest
distance, then that HA is marked as a transitional area between cluster k and
cluster h,
\
i ∈ CKH if Dih < Diℓ ,∀ℓ ̸= {k, h} Dih < (1 + ξ)Dik . (7)

3 Data
Data for all varieties considered have been collected from multiple and diverse
sources, including material covering the phonetics of specific varieties (see Se-
lected Sources: Specific Varieties), larger areas or entire regions (see Selected
Sources: Larger Areas), comprehensive monographies (see Selected Sources:

9
Comprehensive Monographies) and linguistic atlases (see Selected Sources: Lin-
guistic Atlases) including acoustic atlases. Other speech material available on
the web, both ethnographic and spontaneous, has also provided data for cer-
tain dialectal traits. Good dialectal dictionaries, although often written by
non-professional researchers, have been found for many varieties. Dialectal lit-
erature (mostly, poetry) in specific varieties and collections covering broader
areas have been also perused, particularly for those traits that are unambiguous
when written. Many of these non-scholarly sources are listed in the compan-
ion website. Less canonically, many data have been obtained by inspecting,
searching, and sometimes querying dialect-oriented groups in social networks
such as Facebook. Older scholarly data have been systematically checked in the
(written) conversations found in these groups.
As a result, a database containing thousands of observations has been pre-
pared and is available to the readers upon request to the author. Based on that,
the strings for each variety have been constructed and the homogeneous areas
identified.
Inspection of unclassified results provides already some useful insight. For
instance, it is possible to graphically represent on a map the distances from a
given HA, creating similarity maps as defined in [Goebl et al., 2019]. Moreover,
“isogloss maps” and “beam maps” have been also created. Examples of the
latter for all regions considered are shown in the companion website, where only
‘beams’ corresponding to distances D ≤ 1 are plotted, depicting the emergence
of dialectal continua. However, this analysis yields many small continua and a
large number of isolated areas (whose distance with all conterminous areas is
larger than 1), making a significant classification impossible. For this purpose,
the most useful analysis is that of clustering, which is presented in the next
section.

4 Results
Clustering with several values of K ranging from 2 to 11 have been run and
inspected. For higher values of K the overall results become very sensitive to the
random initialization, unstable, and thus are not shown. Table 2 summarizes
the main divides (traditionally, the “isoglosses”) that characterize each new
partition, as well as the new groups that emerge from it.
The silhouette factor as a function of K is shown in 2. Values are given
as the mean of four series of runs plus/minus the standard deviation. When
the latter is small, it means that the results are stable when different series
of runs are executed. As it can be observed, the factor σ generally decreases
with the number of clusters, with the coincidence intervals of two consecutive
K that are generally not overlapping. However, three values of K emerge as
local maxima, namely, K = 2, 4, and 8. These partitions are all very stable,
as evidenced by a variance of the silhouette coefficient low or null. A fourth
cluster number, K = 10 has a mean silhouette factor that is close to that with
K = 9 and presents an overlap of the respective confidence intervals, meaning

10
that for some series of runs the silhouette could be higher with K = 10 than
with K = 9. However, partition K = 10 is also the least stable, with a large
variance due to concurrent clustering results.

Table 2: Clustering results as a function of the no. of clusters K.

New groups in bold.

K Main new divide (w.r.t. Groups identified σ

K − 1)
2 Salerno-Lucera-Vieste Northern space vs. 0.397 ± 0.000
(SLV) Southern space
3 Gaeta-Sora-Termoli (GST), Northern, Central, 0.364 ± 0.001
Alento-Agri-Taranto- Southern subspaces
Brindisi
4 GST, SLV, Alento-Crati- Northern, 0.366 ± 0.000
Nardò-Brindisi Campanian-Molisan,
Apulian-Lucanian,
Southern subspaces
5 Sora-L’Aquila-S. Benedetto Northern subspace, 0.336 ± 0.003
Abruzzese,
Campanian-Molisan,
Apulian-Lucanian,
Southern subspaces
6 Foggia-Potenza-Cassano Northern subspace, 0.323 ± 0.003
Abruzzese,
Campanian-Molisan,
Apulian,
Irpino-Lucanian,
Southern subspace
7 Pollino-Sila-Lamezia Northern subspace, 0.322 ± 0.001
Abruzzese,
Campanian-Molisan,
Apulian, Irpino-Lucanian,
Cosentino,
Salentino-Calabrian
8 Latina-Ancona Perimedian, Median, 0.315 ± 0.002
Abruzzese,
Campanian-Molisan,
Apulian, Irpino-Lucanian,
Cosentino,
Salentino-Calabrian

11
 0.4

silhouette coefficient
0.38

0.36

0.34

0.32

0.3
2 4 6 8 10
K

Figure 2: Silhouette coefficient as a function of the number of groups.

9 irregular Perimedian, Median, 0.315 ± 0.002

Abruzzese, Samnite,
Neapolitan-Molisano,
Apulian, Irpino-Lucanian,
Cosentino,
Salentino-Calabrian
10 Irregular As above, but Salentino 0.315 ± 0.005
split from Calabrian
11 Irregular As above, but 0.313 ± 0.001
Irpino-Lucanian split in
two groups

Table 3: List of Province codes. Regional capital cities in bold.

THE MARCHES (Marche) CAMPANIA

Ancona AN Avellino AV
Ascoli Piceno AP Benevento BN
Fermo FM Caserta CE
Macerata MC Napoli NA
UMBRIA Salerno SA
Perugia PG APULIA (Puglia)
Terni TN Bari BA
LATIUM (Lazio) Barletta-Andria-Trani BT
Frosinone FR Brindisi BR
Latina LT Foggia FG
Rieti RI Lecce LE

12
 Roma RM Taranto TA
Viterbo VT BASILICATA
ABRUZZI (Abruzzo) Matera MT
L’Aquila AQ Potenza PZ
Chieti CH CALABRIA
Pescara PE Cosenza CS
Teramo TE Catanzaro CZ
MOLISE Crotone KR
Campobasso CB Reggio di Calabria RC
Isernia IS Vibo Valentia VV

The first optimal classification with K = 2 divides the overall space con-
sidered into a Northern and a Southern space, separated by a line that resem-
bles the traditional Salerno-Lucera (actually, Salerno-Lucera (FG)-Vieste (FG),
SLV) isogloss bundle. For instance, around this line lays the northern limit of
KJ > /ţ:/ (see trait 15 in Table 1).
In the partition with K = 4 each of these subspaces split in two. Thus,
a Northern subspace is separated from a Central-Northern subspace by a line
running from around Gaeta (LT) on the Tyrrhenian coast to around Termoli
(CB) on the Adriatic coast, with an elbow around Sora (FR). The Central-
Northern subspace is separated from a Central-Southern subspace by a SLV line,
although not exactly coincident with the previous one. Finally, the Central-
Southern subspace is separated from a Southern subspace by two lines, one
running from around the mouth of the Alento river (SA) on the Tyrrhenian
coast to the mouth of the Crati river (CS) on the Ionian coast, the other running
from around Nardò (LE) on the Ionian coast to around Brindisi on the Adriatic
coast.
The next optimal classification is with K = 8. Incidentally, this value of
K almost matches the number of administrative regions (Regioni) in the space
considered. This partition could be thus a promising basis for the definition of
more accurate “regional languages” in this half of Italy. The groups identified
by clustering with K = 8 are listed in Table 2 and detailed here from North to
South as:
1. “Perimedian” group, including provincial capitals AN, PG, VT, RM, LT,
and areas in Northern Marches, in Central-Western Umbria, in Western
Latium, besides a hamlet (frazione) in Basilicata (a Marchigiano colony).
2. “Median” group, including provincial capitals MC, FM, TN, RI, FR, AQ,
and areas in Central Marche, South-Eastern Umbria, Central Latium,
Western Abruzzi.
3. “Abruzzese” group, including provincial capitals AP, TE, PE, CH, and
areas in Southern Marche, Eastern Abruzzi, Southern Latium, besides a
few smaller areas in Molise.
4. “Campanian-Molisan” group, including provincial capitals IS, CB, BN,
NA, CE, SA, and areas in South-Eastern Latium, Molise, Northern-Central

13
 Campania, besides some smaller areas in Northern Apulia and Basilicata
around and including the provincial capital PZ (Gallo-Italic colonies).
5. “Apulian” group, including provincial capitals FG, BAT, BA, TA, MT,
BR, and areas in Northern-Central Apulia, South-Eastern Basilicata, North-
Eastern Calabria, besides some smaller areas in Central Campania.
6. “Irpino-Lucanian” group, including provincial capital AV and areas in
Southern-Eastern Campania, Western Basilicata, and North-Eastern Apu-
lia.
7. “Cosentino” group, including provincial capital CS and areas in Southern
Campania (likely having a Greek substratum), Northern Calabria, besides
some smaller areas in Basilicata (most of them being or having been Gallo-
Italic colonies).
8. “Salentino-Calabrian” group, including provincial capitals LE, KR, VV,
CZ, RC, and areas in Southern Apulia and Central-Southern Calabria,
besides some smaller areas in Northern Calabria.
Figure 3 shows the attribution of each HA to one of the nine clusters, iden-
tified by a colour. It must be noted that the k-means algorithm has no knowl-
edge about the spatial correlation between the HA, each of them representing
a “point” in an 18-dimensioned space, with these points that can be geograph-
ically ordered in any arbitrary way. Though, the spatial consistency of the
results is striking, and the groups obtained clearly recall traditional regions and
dialectal groups. The actual boundaries between the eight groups can be traced
on a map as depicted in Fig. 4.
Boundary between groups 1–2 recalls a well-known isogloss, the Northern
limit of simultaneous /NT/ > /nd/ and /ND/ > /nn/ (see trait 13 in Table 1)
that traditionally separates the Central Italian dialects into a “Perimedian”
and a “Median” section (whence the naming of groups 1 and 2 used here).
Boundary 2–3 runs similarly to another definitory isogloss, the Northern limit
of [@] (see trait 4 in Table 1), which serves to separate Central from Southern
(“Neapolitan language”) dialects in traditional classifications. Boundary 3–4,
or the GST bundle introduced above, is similar to the Northern limit of PL
> /kj/ (see trait 7 in Table 1) or isogloss 21 in Pellegrini’s map. Boundary
between 4 on one side and 5, 6 on the other, is the SLV bundle discussed above.
Boundary between 5, 6 on one side and 7, 8 on the other, recalls the Northern
limit of non-standard tonic vowel systems (trait 18 in Table 1), which is different
from isogloss 25 (Southern limit of [@]) that is traditionally used to separate the
Intermediate Southern dialects from the Extreme Southern dialects (“Sicilian”
language). Finally, the North-South boundary between groups 6, 7 on one
side and 5, 8 on the other, matches almost perfectly a less used isogloss, i.e.,
the Western limit of LJ > /é/ (see trait 9 in Table 1), whereas in traditional
classifications the corresponding boundaries are purely administrative.
Figures 5 (schematic view) and 6 (pictorial) show the transitional areas
identified with the method (7) of second-best clusters (with ξ = 0.5). These

14
Figure 3: HA clustered in K = 8 groups: schematic representation.
Each colour corresponds to one group: blue (Perimedian), purple (Median),
pink (Abruzzese), red (Samnite), orange (Neapolitan-Molisano), green (Apu-
lian), yellow (Irpino-Lucanian), grey blue (Cosentino), light blue (Salentino-
Calabrian).

15
Figure 4: HA clustered in K=9 groups: a linguistic map with actual group
boundaries. Colours of groups correspond to those of Fig. 3

16
Figure 5: HA clustered in K=8 groups with second-best clusters: schematic
representation. Core clusters are identified by the left-half colour of the circles;
second-best clusters in transitional area are identified by right-half colours.

results suggest the existence of such areas at the geographical boundary between
groups 1 and 2 (in Marche, Umbria, and Latium), 2 and 3 (in Marche, Abruzzi,
and Latium), 2 and 4 (in Latium), 3 and 4 (in Latium, Abruzzi, Molise, and
Apulia), 4 and 5 (in Apulia), 4 and 6 (in Campania), 5 and 6 (in Apulia and
Basilicata), 6 and 7 (in Basilicata), 5 and 7 (in Calabria), 7 and 8 (in Apulia
and Calabria), 7 and 8 (in Calabria). Again, these results are consistent with
geography in the sense that transitional areas are generally identified between
clusters that actually share a geographical border.

5 Conclusions
In this paper, we have presented a dialectometry-based study aimed at classi-
fying the Romance varieties of Central-Southern Italy. We have analysed the
thousands of varieties under study and operated a massive pre-treatment of data
available from many sources. Instead of trying to gather a vocabulary of word
entries, we opted for a reduced data set, where each variety is characterized with

17
Figure 6: HA clustered in K=8 groups with second-best clusters: a linguistic
map with actual group boundaries and transitional areas (hatched).

18
respect to 18 phonetic traits, including the isoglosses that have been tradition-
ally used by linguists to define dialectal groups. On this basis we have identified
647 homogeneous areas as the groups conterminous varieties that share the same
traits. As a result, we have got an operating data set of 647 points in an 18-
dimensional space, where we could define linguistic distances. We have then
formulated the problem as a clustering problem, that is, find the K clusters
of those points that minimise the within-cluster linguistic distance. We have
used a k-means algorithm to cluster and an ad-hoc rule to define second-best
clusters and transitional areas. We have used silhouette analysis to select the
most appropriate number of clusters.
The results are geographically consistent, although the algorithms used have
no information about the actual geographical distance between areas or the
boundaries shared by them. The groups identified for various numbers K re-
semble but do not coincide with the regional varieties traditionally invoked. For
example, when the partition with K = 3 is compared with the traditional high-
level (Pellegrini’s areas) tripartite grouping into Central, Intermediate Southern,
and Extreme Southern, the results do not match unless the Central area includes
the Abruzzese.
The methods used suggest that clustering with 8 groups is the most appro-
priate choice. The dialectal groups identified (labelled as Perimedian, Median,
Abruzzese, Campanian-Molisan, Apulian, Irpino-Lucanian, Cosentino, and Salentino-
Calabrese) again do not coincide with the regional varieties (Pellegrini’s subar-
eas) traditionally invoked. The six geographic boundaries that can be roughly
traced between them (considering that the geographical representations of the
clusters are not perfectly connected in the topological sense) loosely run along
known isoglosses, which are all among the 18 traits considered. However, in no
way these isoglosses are favored a priori but it is the algorithm that ‘naturally’
selects them in the optimization process, which in turn depends on the entire
set of traits considered. This contrast with the traditional classification that is
based on a mixture of fewer definitory isoglosses and administrative or historical
boundaries.
We conclude that a classification based on these grounds is less arbitrary than
traditional ones based on selected isoglosses as it considers multiple dialectal
traits on an equal footing. It is also less subjective since the partitioning is
made by an algorithm that tries to minimise a clearly defined objective function.
Another strength of the method is that it can be readily adapted as long as new
data is available, varieties evolve, or corrections are made to the data set.

End Note
The author maintains a popularisation website (in Italian) at http://www.
asciatopo.altervista.org/dialettolog.html which contains a detailed de-
scription of the varieties and their arrangement in homogeneous areas, and sev-
eral linguistic maps.

19
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Linguistic Atlases
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microcontact.hum.uu.nl

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