Geolinguistic analysis of the spelling in the 1923 Burgundian dialect text L'âme du Morvan

The first edition of the text, L'âme du Morvan, in the Morvan dialect was published in 1923. Morvan is in central Burgundy. Historically, it belonged to neighboring regions and was never united (Richard 1973: 153, 291). According to Ito (2020, 2021, 2022), no unified language was spoken in Morvan during the mid-20th century. In the 39 stories in this book, we find variations in spelling. Because some words are spelled differently in different stories, we hypothesize that the 39 stories could have been written in different spoken language and seek to determine which regional spoken language the stories were written in. First, we presume the pronunciations of forms representing 261 words across 39 stories. Second, we compare them with the pronunciations of 18 Morvan locations in the Atlas Linguistique et Ethnographique de la Bourgogne (ALB), the Linguistic Atlas of Burgundy. Based on the coincidence ratio of the 18 locations, we classify the 39 stories using cluster analysis. Next, we visualize the group that is the most consistent with the locations. Finally, we consider whether the 39 stories were written in the same spoken language or several spoken languages. The spelling analysis suggests that the 39 stories may have been written slightly differently; however, they were written in the dialect of the Saulieu region—the Bas-Morvan dialect.