Quantitative and qualitative methods in philology: Some reflections connected to the process of language change in Skåne

Abstract

Almost 340 years ago the king of Sweden conquered the province of Skane from the kingdom of Denmark, a change of political borders in Scandinavia which has turned out to be permanent. In 1978–1979 the author published two volumes about the connected process of language change of the province. In this paper the quantitative and qualitative methods used for revealing features of this process are rescrutinised to some extent, for a general discussion about the use of quantitative vs. qualitative methods in diachronic linguistics.

Notes

Thanks to David Cousins, who has improved my English!

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