Dialect Atlas and Measuring Dialect Distances in Hamedan

This article aims at preparing the dialect atlas for southern half of Hamedan province and measuring the distance between dialects according to principles of dialectometry. Method: descriptive-analytic method is used. The data has been gathered from 15 locations through systematic random sampling, in 5 counties of Hamedan, using a questionnaire consisted of 149 words and phrases and 44 basic sentences derived from Swadesh basic concepts list.. 25 words claasified in four main catheories(nature, family, animals, time) have been chosen using random sampling method for this study. Findings: lexical varieties and their distributions have been shown in 5 location symbol Dialect Atlases. The degree of similarity and distance between different locations, the least and most frequent word forms, and the degree of lexical variation in all categories and all locations have been measured. Results: according to distance matrix and the resulted dendogram, the dialects have been classified into 9 groups. The dialect distance between locations 14 & 15 in Hamedan County is the least with lexical similarity of 60 percent. Locations 8 & 9 in Malayer County have also shown great amount of lexical similarity about 56 percent. Lexical similarity between dialects in Malayer and Nahavand are more than other counties. Lexical variation in “nature” category is the highest and in “animals” is the lowest.