dialectinvariant
Dialectinvariant is a neologism used in linguistic literature to denote a discrete linguistic form that functions as a characteristic variant of a particular dialect or set of dialects. It encompasses phonological, lexical, syntactic, or morphological realizations that mark regional or social subgroups and that can be compared across dialect continua. Unlike a general dialect feature without scope, a dialectinvariant is treated as a catalogued unit with evaluable distribution across populations, enabling quantitative analysis and cross-dialect mapping.
In practice, researchers identify dialectinvariants from corpora and fieldwork, coding instances by region, age, gender, and
Notes: The term is not widely standardized; in most works, researchers refer to dialect features or dialectal