How we use the questionnaires...
All the responses to the questions in the questionnaire are transcribed to create a database.
This can be used to map the answers of everyone who took part and see geographical patterns
in the languages today. For instance, the map on the right shows the geographical distribution of
amdana chdi and amdanat ti, two dialectally variable ways of saying 'about you'.
The red dots represents people who used amdana chdi in the questionnaire in a wide area
across the northwest. The green dots represent people who used amdanat ti. The region where amdana chdi
is used has been growing over the last century: there's no evidence of anyone saying amdana chdi before
the middle of the twentieth century.
As more people take part, we can expand these maps with more people, and hopefully we will see more complex patterns than the one on the map here. Since people of all ages are contributing to the atlas, we would expect to discover places where old people say amdanat ti and young people say amdana chdi. We can also see the effect of schools, which tend to favour amdanat ti: is amdanat ti fighting back, as it were, in the language of people from non-Welsh-speaking homes who were educated through the medium of Welsh. But to see patterns like this, we need more questionnaires than we have at the moment.