Terrior

The unit of work is a regional language profile. A profile is a structured description of how people in one region actually use a language. It is written to be read, and to be edited.

Because a profile is a document, it can be checked entry by entry. When text produced from a profile reads wrong to someone from the region, the fault can be traced to a specific entry, and that entry corrected.

Three kinds of observation go into a profile.

The first is choice. Where a language offers several competing words for one thing, a region tends to settle on one of them. The profile records which one.

The second is mixing. Where a region writes one language with words borrowed from another, the profile records how often the borrowed word is used in place of the native one.

The third is divergence. Some words are shared by a region and its neighbours but understood differently on either side of the boundary. The spelling is the same and the sense is not. This measure has not yet produced a result that profiles use.

Two samples of writing never agree exactly, even when they come from the same place. Some difference between two regions is therefore expected by chance alone. A difference only counts if it is larger than the difference found inside a single region.

Each measurement is calibrated against a within-region noise floor, the spread observed when one region’s usage is compared with another sample of itself. A word is reported as regional only when the difference between regions stands clear of that floor. Results are then checked against words that dictionaries already record as regional.

Word choice in German: Germany, Austria and Switzerland

September 2026

The measure of word choice was first tested on words that dictionaries already record as Austrian or Swiss. Of those that occurred in the material, 98% were assigned to the correct country. On a control set of common words with no known regional alternative, 4% were marked as regional in error.

Applied to everyday commercial vocabulary, the measure finds words that one country uses markedly more often than the other two: brutto in Austria, Gutschein and Versandkosten in Germany, Kundendienst and Abo in Switzerland.

Differences in meaning, where one word is understood differently on either side of a border, were measured as well. Some words differ by more than the within-region noise floor, but most of them are adverbs and function words whose usage varies for other reasons. Profiles do not yet use this measure.

English in Hindi: Delhi and Lucknow

September 2026

Delhi and Lucknow share a written standard. The measurement covered 113 concepts, each of which can be written either with an English loanword or with a Hindi word. The two cities discuss these concepts equally often. They differ in which word they choose: Delhi uses the English word 40% of the time and Lucknow 28%. Of the 102 concepts where the cities differ at all, Delhi uses more English for 87 (sign test, p = 1.7 × 10⁻¹³).

The gap is not limited to commercial words, and general vocabulary shows it too.

The difference between the cities appears in two independent sources of text. The absolute level of English does not carry over from one source to the other, and within one city it varies between sources about as much as it varies between the cities. What holds is the difference.

Research. Measurement is complete for German in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and for Hindi in Delhi and Lucknow. The profile format is defined. A study in which reviewers from each region compare text written from a profile with standard localisation is designed and has not yet been run.

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