Isogloss

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Isoglosses on the Faroe Islands

High German subdivides into Upper German (green) and Central German (blue), and is distinguished from Low Saxon-Low Franconian (yellow). The main isoglosses, the Benrath and Speyer lines are marked in black.

An isogloss is the geographical boundary of a certain linguistic feature, e.g. the pronunciation of a vowel, the meaning of a word, or use of some syntactic feature. Major dialects are typically demarcated by whole bundles of isoglosses, e.g. the Benrath line that divides High German and Low Saxon-Low Franconian; or the La Spezia-Rimini Line which divides the eastern Romance languages from the western ones. Undoubtedly, the largest well-known isogloss is the Centum-Satem isogloss, which traditionally separates the Indo-European languages into two distinct genetic categories.

The name is inspired by contour lines such as isobar, etc.; however, the isogloss separates rather than connects points of equal language (perhaps one could say it connects points of indefinite language).

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