Twentieth-Century Varieties Reflecting Mediaeval Settlement in Normandy: combining modern and historical dialectology

The article demonstrates how the methods of modern dialectology can be used together with established dialectological and toponymic findings to inform our understanding of present-day variation. The linguistic data used are from the ‘Atlas

Linguistique et Ethnographique Normand’, whose data were collected in the 1970s, and in which many of the words given to researchers are probably Norman as opposed to French. The comparison of these data with the known settlement patterns

of Vikings in Normandy in the ninth to eleventh centuries shows clearly that the Vikings’ mediaeval settlement patterns are reflected in isoglosses which can be drawn based on the Atlas’ twentieth-century data, and the statistics of the modern

methods show how strong the correlation is.