About Page: Research
The Sound Comparisons website is intended to support any research in linguistics which can make use of the data it provides.
The researchers who created Sound Comparisons use it in particular as a database from which they attempt to measure how far the many languages, ‘dialects’ and accents of a language family have diverged from each other, in the exact pronunciations of particular related words, over the many centuries since their original common ancestral ‘proto-’language of that family. Note the contrasts in pronunciations of the word daughter in various accents of English, and indeed other related languages within the Germanic family, such as German ‘Tochter’, Dutch dochter, Icelandic dóttir, and so on.
Those measures of language divergence can then in turn be fed into a range of quantitative techniques to produce family trees or networks to represent those patterns of divergence over time. These linguistic data can then help understand the history and prehistory of the populations that spoke the language families we cover.
For examples of how this works, see the ‘network’ representations of divergence in phonetics between accents of English, and other languages of the Germanic language family, available here. For more examples, see also here.
