278 Raphael Berthele
dialects, two dialects that are both geographically and linguistically op-
posed to each other.
Before discussing these details, it is useful to look at the overall “land-
scape of mappings” in our sample. In order to get a general overview of the
different languages and varieties that were mapped onto the visual stimuli
in Figure 1, we can take a look at relative frequencies and relative distances
between the varieties that can be calculated via statistical scaling proce-
dures. First, Table 3 represents those varieties that were mapped at least 10
times to any one of the stimuli depicted in Figure 1. Table 3 gives the read-
er an idea of the languages and varieties that have been associated with the
stimuli by the participants. The level of language-categorization is differ-
ent, we find rather fine-grained lectal categories such as “Uri dialect”, “Ba-
varian dialect” next to the quite unspecific global term “Swiss German”
which does not refer to a specific variety but rather to all the different
Swiss German varieties, and obviously there are also labels for “Abstand”-
languages such as “English” and “French”.
Figure 3. MDS analysis of the data given in Table 3
The values given in Table 3 can be transformed into spatial distances and
coordinates by applying the multidimensional scaling procedure (MDS;
Kruskal and Wish 1991). The 2-dimensional output of this can be seen in
Figure 3. As usual, the dimensions in MDS output are not meaningful as
such, they simply represent a measure of relative proximity with respect to