Welcome to the Linguistic Atlas of the Iberian Peninsula (ALPI) on the web, a site with the goal of providing more than 15 000 pages of dialectological and geolinguistic data, directly reproduced from over 500 surveys conducted throughout the Iberian Peninsula by the ALPI fieldworkers, under the direction of Tomás Navarro Tomás: Francesc de Borja Moll, Aurelio M. Espinosa [junior], Luís F. Lindley Cintra, Aníbal Otero, Lorenzo Rodríguez-Castellano y Manuel Sanchis Guarner. The field surveys were conducted between 1931 and 1935, for the most part, and the remainder were completed between 1947 and 1957.

How to use this site: in order to consult the ALPI data, begin by clicking on the Database Search located in the top banner. We hope to gradually add more survey points and more provinces, as well as the territories of Portugal, Andorra and Roussillon (Pyrénnées Orientales), all of which were covered by the ALPI surveys. By clicking on the link, you will be asked to choose a working language. From there you will be able to choose a region, then one or various localities, followed by the items in the questionaire itself. This will lead to a link with the scanned image of the corresponding page in the original survey notebook, with the responses for the various items transcribed in phonetic alphabet.

This site is just a prototype which is still under development, and so any suggestions, corrections or comments you may have will be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance for sending your feedback by e-mail to: djheap@uwo.ca
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Traditionally, data in linguistic atlases appear in the form of maps on which phonetic transcriptions or other symbols are printed at each of the points surveyed. Although electronic cartography may allow us to speed up this process greatly, it still requires the data to be transcribed and / or digitalised. At this point, we have neither the resources nor enough skilled labour to transcribe such an amount of data, but we nonetheless aspire to make the raw data available to the scientific community. This is done by means of scanned images from the original field notebooks, which can be located using a map in order to select survey points and the questionnaire to choose the data of interest.
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The ALPI was originally conceived of around 1914 by the eminent Spanish philologist Ramón Menéndez Pidal, who entrusted the supervision of the project to his student and disciple, Tomás Navarro Tomás. The questionnaire was completed and printed in 1930 and in 1931, with the support of the Centro de Estudios Históricos, the surveys began. Three teams of fieldworkers covered the Iberian Peninsula: Francesc de Borja Moll and Manuel Sanchis Guarner in the Valenciano Catalan zone, Aurelio M. Espinosa [jr.] and Lorenzo Rodríguez Castellano in the Castilian-speaking areas, and in the Galician-Portuguese area, Aníbal Otero with Rodrigo de Sa Nogueira, substituted (for health reasons) first by Armando Nobre de Guzmão, and finally by Luís F. Lindley Cintra.

The fieldwork was 90% completed when the Spanish Civil War broke out, forcing an end to the ALPI surveys. Navarro Tomás left Spain in exile as a result of the war, taking the ALPI materials with him. These notebooks were returned to Spain in 1951, under the control and care of the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas in Madrid. With the ongoing support of Menéndez Pidal and the help of Rafael de Balbín (Director of Publications and Second Vice-secretary Segundo of the C.S.I.C.), the remaining surveys were completed between 1947 and 1954. Sanchis Guarner coordinated with Rodríguez Castellano and Aníbal Otero the painstaking work of preparing the materials for publication, which only yield a single volume (Atlas Lingüístico de la Península Ibérica, Madrid: C.S.I.C. 1962, tomo I, Fonética). Shortly thereafter the publishing work was suspended, and the ALPI notebooks were left (almost forgotten) in different places (private homes, different kinds of archives) until they were found and photocopied by between 1999 and 2001 by David Heap of the University of Western Ontario.
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The ALPI fieldworkers used the phonetic alphabet developed by the Revista de filología española with a few modifications made by Navarro Tomás himself in the interest of greater precision. Thus the transcription system used in the ALPI does not have an exact equivalent in other systems (for example, the International Phonetic Alphabet), and users unfamiliar with this transcription system are advised to consult the Table of Phonetic Symbols before trying to decipher the data reproduced from the notebooks.
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In fact there are three questionnaires: Cuaderno I: Fonética y morfosintaxis (Notebook I: Phonetics and morphosyntax) with some 411 items, Cuaderno IIG: léxico, General (Notebook IIG: Lexicon, general) and Cuaderno IIE: léxico, extendido (Notebook IIE: Lexicon: extended). Notebook IIG was relatively little used, and at each survey point Notebook I was (always) used, and Notebook IIE was (usually) used. Due to space limitations, the display is limited for now to images of Notebook I.
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The photocopies of the original workbooks were scanned in either Black and White Bitmap mode or Grayscale when a copy had a dark background. The scanned pages were edited in Adobe Photoshop 7.0, where they were cleaned up, and depending on the ultimate result, sharpened or filtered with Facet. In order to identify each page, text referring to the location point and to the workbook was added (e.g., 100.I, p. 2, which reads 'location 100, workbook 1, page 2'). The resolution of the original scan was then modified to 100 pix/inch, and the result was saved in .JPEG format. The same page was immediately rescaled to 700 pix/inch width in order to provide a legible printable version of the page and it was saved as a .PDF file.
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