Latgalistikys kongresu materiali, III. 2011. - Latvijas Universitāte

they read books and newspapers. Moreover, the answers to a question
about known languages or dialects provide a general overview of the possibly
existing linguistic repertoire of the area. In order to avoid idiosyncratic
influences inn the answers on single questions (for instance, the language
spoken by the multilingual population with the monolingual doctor
or priest is necessarily influenced by the language competence of these
monolinguals) and in order to give a better readable image of the linguistic
complexity, the questions have been unified into the following 5 categories
(or a m b i t s ): family, community, work, public life, reading and writing.
(For a similar analysis in other European situations see Dell’Aquila, Iannàccaro
2006a, 2008b, 2008c, Iannàccaro forth.)
Family Community Work Public life Read/Write
Mother
Father
Siblings
Partner
Sons/Daughters
Older relatives
Neighbours
Children
Shop-keepers
Colleagues
Teachers
Doctor
Priest
Civil servants
Reading
Writing
Table 1: Ambits and sociolinguistic situations
Obviously, this classification — as well as the choice of the questions
— is an arbitrary procedure: a different categorisation or the choice
of other questions would influence the data and change the results, but
what we propose here could be largely approved by sociolinguists.
For calculating the sociolinguistic distance between points, an
adapted Euclidean distance model will be used, in order to create a relative
numerical parameter, ranging between the values of 0 and 1, as independent
as possible from the number of the languages and the number of the
variables 22 .
The Euclidean distance is the distance between two points that we
would measure with a ruler, and is given by the Pythagorean formula —
which states that the square of the length of the hypotenuse equals the sum
of the squares of the lengths of the other two sides — in which the two
acute angles of the triangle represent the points we want to measure and
the hypotenuse the distance between them. The position of the points on a
plane surface, for example, is represented by the values of their coordi-
22 The actual formula can be read in Dell'Aquila 2010, p. 469 and p. 471.
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