A critical assessment of English dialect feature catalogues: Towards a dialectometrical evaluation of the English Dialect Dictionary Online

Abstract

Scholars have traditionally described dialects in a selective way by identifying individual, supposedly characteristic, features in a certain area. However, modern dialectology ambitiously claims to depict dialectal areas holistically by simultaneously attributing a large number of important features to geographical space and measuring the difference between dialectal areas. In the face of this quantifying challenge, which some scholars refer to as ‘dialectometry,’ the question of how these features can be defined and found has arisen within the last few decades. This overview article presents a detailed state of the art, drawing on traditional dialectology as well as variationist and recent ‘dialectometrical’ approaches. The question of dialect feature retrieval is answered with the help of the English Dialect Dictionary Online, which is based on Joseph Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary (1898–1905) and has been generally accessible since 2019. The paper is an empirical demonstration of how dialectology could benefit from a new tool and from resultant methods of analysis.