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The Romanian linguistic cartography has recently (2009) celebrated a century since its appearance, period when three series of national linguistic atlases were elaborated, doubled by other cartographic works dedicated to more restrained North or South-Danubian ethno-linguistic areas. This rich tradition in the field represents a solid argument for affirming the maturity of this research direction in Romania on one hand, but it requires a continuous modernization and its methodological update at the same time. This heuristic premise has recently been the basis of many trials of modernizing the Romanian linguistic cartography, modernization understood firstly as an involvement of the computerized methods in editing the linguistic atlases. The first results in this direction were obtained in the academic centre of Iasi where the first volume of the series NALR/ALRR (NALR. Moldova and Bucovina, 3rd volume) appeared in 2007, edited entirely with the help of the computer. It is also here that the first project for elaborating an audio-visual linguistic atlas in Romania is currently developed - the Audio-Visual Linguistic Atlas of Bucovina (ALAB). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1909, Linguistischer Atlas des dacorumänischen Sprachgebietes (WLAD), edited by the German Balkanist Gustav Weigand, was published in Leipzig. At the time it was one of the first achievements in this respect on the European level. Within a century the Romanian language has got two more linguistic atlases with a national character as well as some regional atlases (their authors being both Romanian and foreign researchers), a fact that gives a privileged status to the Romanian language among the other European languages. Lately, the Romanian specialists have created interdisciplinary research programs that might permit the inclusion of the digitized technologies in the process of editing the Romanian linguistic atlases. The first software application was achieved in Iaşi, with its help being completely edited the 3rd volume of NALR. Moldova şi Bucovina - a Romanian novelty in this field. The researches for modernizing the method of linguistic geography have been encouraged on the academic level in Iaşi. As a result of the collaboration among specialists in dialectology and computer scientists, a new research project is in progress referring to an audio-visual linguistic atlas of Bucovina - another novelty on the national level and one of the first of this type in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]