Dialectology

Abstract

Dialectology is not a coherent field with a single set of methodologies. Instead, it has developed since the 1960s to become an interest of many different interconnected fields, from typology to geographic information systems (GIS), from historical linguistics to phonetics. Within all of these subareas, dialectology has become increasingly more computational. The study of dialects is one of the oldest fields of language study, and the modern examination of dialects involves both linguistic and social analysis. As an example of its lineage, the American Dialect Society was founded in 1889; the scholarship those members produced between then and the 1960s could be described as a closely related set of methodologies designed to document words and pronunciations in order to delineate primarily geographical dialect boundaries and, secondarily, language change. From the 1960s forward, the study of dialects developed through the emerging fields of language variation and change, sociolinguistics, and computational linguistics. Modern scholars of dialects, be they starting off or established, should be aware of the wealth of information produced from the significant effort of the earlier decades of dialectology, and some gateways to that scholarship are cited herein. For example, the journal American Speech was established in 1925, and its early volumes are worth investigating for modern scholars to understand the changes in methodologies and research questions that have occurred. For this bibliography, however, most of the citations point to the diversified period from the 1960s forward. During that time, dialectology ceased to be a single entity, but instead became a subcomponent of many different fields. The plethora of language-related handbooks that publishers now regularly produce often contain a chapter related to dialect variation. With the diversity of dialect methods came an explosion in the number of publications on dialects. Additionally, for the over 6,900 languages on earth, scholars have come to realize that the many thousands of dialects offer opportunities to study how language and society work. Most of the scholarship involving dialects is focused on linguistic research questions, but dialect variation has proved a useful area of focus for scholars of social analysis. With the thousands of publications on dialect variation produced over the last fifty years, the citations provided here should be seen as worthwhile examples and gateways to other quality scholarship. From the works cited here, various paths of modern dialect research unfold.