Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz

Digitized dialect maps

On this web site, you can find digitized maps of the Swiss German dialect atlas SDS (Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz).

Interactive maps

The digitized maps (version 3) can be consulted online using the top menu bar: Interactive point maps shows the original maps, whereas Interpolated surface maps shows surface maps interpolated with kernel density estimation.

Version 3

NEW July 2019! Version 3 contains 62 additional maps, digitized by Roy Weiss (University of Zurich, 2013-2014). Part of these maps replace or amend existing digitized maps from version 2. The version 3 maps are available for download as ArcGIS shapefiles as well as tab-separated raw text files. The documentation contains information about the selected variables and variants.

Version 3 was presented in the publication below. If you use the data, please cite our work as follows:

  • Yves Scherrer & Philipp Stoeckle (2016): “A quantitative approach to Swiss German – Dialectometric analyses and comparisons of linguistic levels.” Dialectologia et Geolinguistica, 24(1), 92-125.

Version 2

For version 2, 19 additional maps were digitized, and 11 maps of version 1 were corrected and amended. This work was done by Sandra Kellerhals (University of Zurich) between 2013 and 2014. The version 2 maps are available for download as ArcGIS shapefiles as well as tab-separated raw text files. The documentation contains information about the selected variables and variants.

Version 1

Version 1 consists in a data set of 216 working maps. They have been compiled and digitized by Yves Scherrer between 2009 and 2012. There are 65 working maps on phonetics and phonology (SDS volumes 1 and 2), 115 maps on morphosyntax (SDS volume 3) and 36 maps on lexical phenomena (SDS volumes 4 to 8).

The working maps are available for download as ArcGIS shapefiles. The documentation contains information about the selected variables and variants.