Geolinguistics in Lithuania: contemporary inventory discourses

ENWith traditional dialects undergoing changes in the 21st century, the ways to analyse local language variants are altering, too. Repositories of heterogenous linguistic material are being developed using Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, the accumulated Big Data is handled and analysed applying quantitative and qualitative methods, while the results are mapped out and visualised with the help of contemporary solutions (Goodchild 1992: 31-45, see also Teerarojanarat, Tingsabadh 2011:363, cf. The Corpus o f Estonian Dialects by the University of Tartu, The German Linguistic Geographic Information System, etc.). Since the emergence of geographic information systems (GIS) in mid-20th century, these techniques have been widely used in foreign linguistics (Lee, Kretschmar 1993: 541-560; Ayad, Luthin 2009:1-26; Teerarojanarat, Tingsabadh 2011: 363; 2011a: 55-75; etc., see also Lee et al. 2018: 152-156; etc.). During the recent years GIS tools are also being systematically applied by geolinguists in Lithuania, the result of wich is the Database o f Lithuanian Local Language Variants, or Tarmynas which is currently being developed as a model of ArcGIS geodatabase in multiuser relational database management system (see ArcGIS, ArcGIS Online; for more information on ArcGIS geodatabases, see ArcGIS geodatabase; for more information on Tarmynas, see also Mikulėnienė, Čepaitienė 2021) 1. The afore-mentioned Lithuanian database Tarmynas is the object of this article. The aim of this article is to provide a more detailed introduction to Tarmynas and its capabilities. In order to achieve this goal, the following tasks have been set: 1) to discuss the structure of Tarmynas and its theoretical basis; 2) to present the capabilities of Tarmynas in researching linguistic variation. This article is supplemented with the research material of Tarmynas. [Extract, p. 291].