Isogloss
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High German subdivides into Upper German (green) and Central German (blue), and is distinguished from Low Saxon-Low Franconian (yellow). The main isoglosses, the Benrath and Speyer lines are marked in black. |
An
isogloss is the geographical boundary of a certain
linguistic feature, e.g. the pronunciation of a
vowel, the meaning of a word, or use of some syntactic feature. Major
dialects are typically demarcated by whole bundles of isoglosses, e.g. the
Benrath line that divides
High German and
Low Saxon-Low Franconian; or the
La Spezia-Rimini Line which divides the eastern
Romance languages from the western ones. Undoubtedly, the largest well-known isogloss is the
Centum-Satem isogloss, which traditionally separates the
Indo-European languages into two distinct genetic categories.
The name is inspired by
contour lines such as
isobar, etc.; however, the isogloss separates rather than connects points of equal language (perhaps one could say it connects points of indefinite language).
