The future of dialects and the dialectology of the future

Abstract

Abstract The days when dialectology was a quiet island in the (sometimes rough) ocean of modern linguistics seem to be over. Since the so-called social turn and the integration of quantitative methods into the study of urban as well as rural dialects, the barriers between early ‘Labovian’ sociolinguistics and dialectology have gradually been broken down. Of late, the study of dialect variation has become more and more an integral part of mainstream formal theory as ‘micro-variation’. Even more recently, constructivist approaches (such as Usage-based Phonology and Exemplar Theory for phonetics as well as ethnographic perspectives) are entering and enriching the field. Apart from these various developments, at least in the Old World, the object appears to be changing more and more rapidly, giving rise to the erosion of traditional dialect landscapes and the emergence of supra-local koinai as well as dialect/standard continua. This paper addresses some of the main aspects of these tendencies. We will discuss questions such as: how can the new types of language variety be studied; can dialectology be enriched with other than the traditional data and methods; how far-reaching is the innovative impact of the various disciplinary, inter-subdisciplinary and inter-disciplinary cross-fertilisations?