Which Language Variety?
What's this?
Which Language Variety? is a service that attempts to approximate the distribution of use of a word or phrase in different geographical areas. Use this tool to check if a word, a phrase or a spelling variation seems to be typical for British English or for American English, for Spanish in Spain or Spanish in Latin America, for German in Germany or German in Austria and so on. The tool currently supports Dutch (The Netherlands or Belgium), English (UK and Ireland, USA, Canada or Australia and New Zealand), Finnish (Finland or Sweden), French (France, Canada, Belgium or Switzerland), German (Germany, Austria or Switzerland), Italian (Italy or Switzerland), Portuguese (Portugal or Brazil), Spanish (Spain or Latin America) and Swedish (Sweden or Finland).
Who is the service intended for?
Anyone with a need to verify if a word or phrase is regional in one way or another will find this service useful, e.g. writers, translators, localizers, journalists, linguists, lexicographers, marketing professionals and so on.
How does it work?
The tool uses Yahoo! Search
and simple statistal measures to make an approximation. The basic idea is to
compare the number of Yahoo! Search hits of a word or phrase in different domains
(such as .pt for Portugal and .br for Brazil when working with
Portuguese). In order to get comparable hit counts for domains
with possibly quite different amounts of web data, the number of
hits of a control term (a very common word, aquele for Portuguese)
is used as weight.
Disclaimer
Even though this service works amazingly well, it is still based on ever-changing web indexes and heavy generalizations. Do not expect scientific evidence, but rather practical guidance.
Whodunnit
This service is provided by Mickel Grönroos, a Language Engineer with experience in corpus linguistics, electronic dictionaries, translation technology and terminology extraction. Feel free to send any comments to mickel dot gronroos ät gmail dot com or visit http://www.linkedin.com/in/mickel.
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This service is provided "as is". Any warranties of fitness for a particular purpose are disclaimed.Please send comments and questions to mickel dot gronroos ät gmail dot com.