The Electronic Dialectal Atlas of Lesbos

In many countries, electronic language mapping is a well-established field of research. In Greece, however, research of this kind is still at an early stage, and the Electronic Dialectal Atlas of the Aegean island of Lesbos (EDAL) constitutes the first attempt to develop such a tool. Freely accessible in both Greek and English, EDAL in its current form comprises 113 linguistic maps, corresponding to dialectal phenomena, words, and expressions that are distributed across the levels of phonology, morphology, morphophonology, morphosyntax, and vocabulary. The first collection of dialectal material was carried out between 2010 and 2015, while the second phase lasted from 2019 to 2021. Data collection relied on a specially designed questionnaire, administered to native, permanent-resident informants of both sexes, all over 60 years of age and of low educational attainment, to maximize the likelihood of eliciting conservative dialectal forms. This article presents the actual linguistic and cartographic methodology underlying EDAL’s development, together with its technical architecture, as has been redesigned and implemented in 2025 by the Laboratory of Cartography and Geoinformatics at the University of the Aegean. Moreover, it discusses its contribution to the documentation of Modern Lesbian, an underrepresented dialect, as well as to electronic language mapping in Greece.