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Dialectology

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 Dialectology

David Britain
Department of Language and Linguistics
University of Essex
Wivenhoe Park
COLCHESTER
Essex
Great Britain
CO4 3SQ

dbritain@essex.ac.uk

Introduction

Dialectology is the study of variation in the lexical and structural components of

language. It is usually associated with the study of geographical variation, especially in

rural areas, but there is much dialectological work today which focuses principally on

social variation and in urban areas (very often to the exclusion of more holistic

spatial considerations (Britain 2002, in press a, b)). Furthermore, it is usually

associated with the consideration of non-standard varieties of language, though again,

this is not an essential characteristic, with more and more work considering

variation and change in standard varieties (see, for example, Harrington, Palethorpe

and Watson 2000, 2006; Fabricius 2002, for English). And it is often associated with

more traditional approaches to studying language variation, such as the study of,
especially, lexical variation, among NORMs (Chambers and Trudgill 1998) – non-

mobile old rural men – using single word elicitation techniques via questionnaires,

but, with the ever greater diversification of sociolinguistics as a discipline, especially

in directions away from areas concerned with core linguistic structure, ‘dialectology’

is undergoing somewhat of a revival as a term to denote broadly variationist

approaches to the study of language with or without an overt focus on social issues.

This entry provides an overview of the history and motivations of dialectology; an

overview of the evolving methodologies associated with the discipline; a

consideration of some of the main spatial dimensions in the subject; and a look at the

main research agendas that are occupying dialectologists today.

The history of dialectology

Chambers and Trudgill (1998: 13-15) argue that until the mid to late nineteenth

century there was very little evidence of a coherent and systematic endeavour to

formally study dialects. Before this time, there had been literary references to dialect

differences, and, of course, much work by orthoepists, dictionary makers,

grammarians and the like largely compelling us not to use non-standard forms, but it

wasn’t until scholars began to react to the work of the 19th century Neogrammarians

that serious and focussed dialectological research began. The Neogrammarians had

argued in favour of the exceptionlessness of sound change, a view that sparked

interest in dialectology because of the wealth of evidence that dialect diversity could

evidently bring to bear on this important question. Early work was largely in the

form of dialect atlases – Wenker’s 1881 Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reiches was the
first published, and was shortly after followed by Gilliéron’s Atlas linguistique de la

France, begun in 1896, with the final volume of the atlas published in 1910. The most

important early British contribution to dialectology was Alexander Ellis’s (1889)

volume 5 of On early English pronunciation, a large survey of over 1100 locations in

Great Britain, from which Ellis devised early maps of Britain’s dialect regions.

Subsequently, dialect atlases were produced for most countries in Europe, the

United States, and beyond. The focus, at this time, was predominantly on rural areas

(which were considered both to be the home of varieties that were more traditional

than those found in urban areas, as well as to be more sheltered from the influences

of social mobility and consequent dialect contact), on men (again, viewed as likely to

produce more traditional conservative dialects) and on the old. Dialectology had a

very clear historicist agenda at this time, investigating the very many different

diachronic developments of earlier structural forms across the dialect landscapes of

the countries surveyed. While occasional nods were made in the direction of social

diversity, in general, the early dialectological literature concerned itself rarely with

intra-speaker or intra-community variability. (see, for example, Jones’ (2006: 274-

280) comments on Ellis’s sensitivity to methodological issues)

The 1960s saw the beginning of sociolinguistic inquiry into dialect, and with it a

whole new set of theoretical orientations and a whole new set of methods. First, it

brought dialectology very firmly to the city (to the extent that the term ‘urban

dialectology’ came to embody an approach and a methodology that could be applied

anywhere, not just in cities), and, because of the focus of investigating language

change in progress (Labov 1966), took into consideration adult speakers, native to the

city under investigation, of all ages, genders and ethnic and social backgrounds.
Secondly, it introduced a whole new theoretical apparatus for considering change in

progress – the linguistic variable, facilitating an analysis of the proportions of use of

different variants; the apparent time model, enabling a simulation of diachrony across

the lifespan; the speech community, focussing on the socio-geographical scope and

evaluation of structural variants, and so on. And finally it came with a whole new set

of methods for data collection, to be discussed in the next section. Sociolinguistic

dialectology has largely but not entirely replaced ‘traditional’ forms of dialectology.

Resources from the work of the latter are still used in a number of contexts - in

shedding light on earlier non-standard variation, for example, during the eras of

colonial settlement (such as the application of the work of Ellis in accounting for the

19th century development of New Zealand English in Britain 2005a, 2008, Gordon,

Campbell, Hay, Maclagan, Sudbury and Trudgill 2004, Trudgill 2004), or as an earlier

real-time check on present-day developments, or as a way of highlighting the locus of

incipient variants that were later to become important and widespread dialect forms.

Sociolinguistic dialectology has itself, of course, developed since its early days – it

began by correlating linguistic structure with relatively under-scrutinised and etic

social categories, such as social class, biological sex, biological age, ‘style’ as

attention-paid-to-speech, and over time these social categories have been unpicked,

contextualised and imbued with the local social meanings essential to rich

sociolinguistic explanation of dialectological patterns. Over time, more emphasis in

theoretical work has been placed on interaction and practice in local contexts,

rather than on the analysis of disconnected individuals who happen to share some

social trait. Furthermore, speakers who had been largely excluded from early

sociolinguistic work – children, mobile people, non-natives – have now been

incorporated into the sociolinguistic dialectological enterprise (see, for example,

Roberts 2002, Foulkes, Docherty and Watt 1999, Trudgill 1986, Chambers 1992,

Horvath 1985, Fox 2007).

Methodologies in dialectology

Early data collection in dialectology seems, from today’s perspective, to have been a

rather rudimentary enterprise, with a host of methods being used that would be

judged unreliable today. We have to bear in mind, though, that dialectology began

before the invention of recording equipment or the motor car – the most

problematic aspects of traditional dialectological method are those concerning how

examples of dialect speech were captured (before the widespread availability of

affordable, unobtrusive and good-quality recording equipment) and how the

dialectologist interacted with and accessed the dialect speakers themselves (given

that it was extremely difficult to get to the small rural locations where NORMs live

without a car). Neither data capture nor access, in the late 19th century, were the

straightforward hurdles to clear that they are today. Wenker, for example, sent lists

of sentences written in Standard German to school teachers around Germany asking

them to transcribe them into the local dialect. Ellis, similarly, sent short reading

passages to local enthusiasts, again asking them to transcribe the passages into the

local dialect (He did, however, have the help of Thomas Hallam, who had some

background in phonetics, as a fieldworker to go around the country checking out

some of the dialect reports sent back by the enthusiasts). Gilliéron, meanwhile, had

Edmond Edmont, a fieldworker who literally cycled around France administering a

long questionnaire in hundreds of different localities to collect data for the Atlas

Linguistique. Given the firmly held sociolinguistic tenet that speakers’ intuitions about

their non-standard language use are often seriously unreliable (see Labov 1996 for an

interesting and useful account of the intuition problem in dialectology), such

transcriptions from the pens of untrained enthusiasts would not be entertained in

the scholarly literature today. Questionnaires tended to be the data collection tool

of choice. The Survey of English Dialects (SED), for example, administered to each

informant in over 300 locations a long and wide-ranging questionnaire containing

over 1000 items such as (1) and (2) below:

(1) When you take a calf away from its mother’s milk, what do you say you do?

[expected response: spane/spone, wean] (Orton 1962:57);

(2) Sometimes, when children are behaving very badly, their mother will tell

them that someone will come and take them away. What do you call this

mysterious person? [expected response: bogey] (Orton 1962: 93).

Sometimes pictures or writing were shown to elicit words, or fill-in-the-gap

techniques applied, most items relating to agriculture, the home and rural ways of

life. The answers were transcribed on the spot by the fieldworkers using IPA. Some

snippets of casual conversation were recorded, but since good quality recording

equipment was in its very infancy at the time of the data collection, Orton admits

that there were quality issues with these recordings (Orton 1962: 19).

The advent of sociolinguistic variationist approaches to dialectology triggered

significant changes in how dialectological data were collected. Early sociolinguistic

work such as that of Labov in Martha’s Vineyard (1963) and New York (1966, see

also 2006) argued very strongly that social dialectology owed much to the earlier
detailed work of the dialect geographers, but that in many methodological respects it

had to part company:

 Traditional dialectology’s fairly rigid questionnaires, with an output from

informants of isolated words or short phrases in response to fieldworker

questions, contrast markedly with the importance placed in social

dialectology on the analysis of informal rapid and continuous vernacular speech.

Despite this basic principle, however, some variationist dialectologists have

continued to collect data from a range of other recorded tasks for specific

purposes (e.g. the recorded reading of word lists and story passages to

allegedly elicit more formal styles of speech or to elicit carefully controlled

phonological contexts for acoustic phonetic analysis);

 Because recording equipment was either non-existent or tended to be bulky,

expensive and, especially to the types of informant whose voice was sought,

off-putting, traditional dialectological surveys tended to rely on the ability of

fieldworkers to remember and instantly transcribe into IPA (or some other

version of phonetic script) the realisations of words produced by the

informants, and without the back-up of recordings to check the reliability of

those transcriptions later. Furthermore, they tended to rely on one sole

instance of a particular structural form from each informant as evidence of

the realisation used in that locality; social dialectology has always been reliant

on the analysis of often hundreds of tokens of the same variable from each

informant (often using the multivariate analysis software Varbrul that was

tailor-made for social dialectology) from recordings of continuous speech which

 can be checked many times and subjected both to reliability tests across a

number of analysts and to acoustic analysis. Trudgill (1983: 35-41), for

example, points to a number of examples of fieldworker inaccuracies in the

SED data from the Eastern English county of Norfolk, and Trudgill, Gordon

and Lewis (1998: 39) and Trudgill (2004: 47) argue that sometimes the

transcriptions in the SED are not detailed enough to be particularly helpful

for historical work;

 Traditional dialectology did not systematically analyse intra-speaker variability,

whereas such variability has, from the very start of social dialectology to the

present, played a very important role in our theorisation of the mechanisms

of language change and the meaning of variation in contemporary speech

communities. Sociolinguistic dialectology has continued to engage in ongoing

deconstructions of intra-speaker variation during its short life to date (Labov

1966, Bell 1984, Coupland 2007);

 Because the fieldwork for traditional dialectological surveys was so time-

consuming, many surveys used a large number of fieldworkers and it was

often difficult to ensure that each one was working to the same script. Britain

(1991), for example, found evidence in the SED that different fieldworkers in

Eastern England had transcribed the continuum between [] and [] for

vowels in the STRUT lexical class (Wells 1982) differently, triggering

dialectologists using the data later to classify the variation in that part of the

country incorrectly;
  Traditional dialectology tended to place more importance on geographical

coverage than on depth within a particular locality – very often localities are

represented by just one (old rural male) person who may or may not be

representative of that section of his community in general. Orton (1962: 16,

for example, reflecting upon the SED data collection, stated that “In the initial

stages of their task, the fieldworkers tended to use too many informants,

sometimes even as many as five”). Although by no means fully representative,

sociolinguistic dialectology has seen it as imperative, if we wish to understand

more about the social locus of linguistic change, to draw more than a single

informant from a broader cross-section of the population of a particular

locality. In the early stages, sociolinguistic dialectology still only analysed data

from natives to the community, whereas later work showed the importance

of including non-natives who may well introduce new dialect forms to local

native communities – so Horvath (1985), for example, showed that linguistic

changes underway in Sydney, Australia could not be understood adequately

without incorporating migrants of Italian and Greek ethnicities into her

analysis, and Fox (2007) has shown how features of the English of Bangladeshi

adolescents in London are spreading to the indigenous White community.

Since the 1960s, however, sociolinguistic dialectological method has moved on, too,

largely in the way it operationalises the social categories which are indexed to

linguistic variability. Researchers have therefore made significant advances in the way

categories such as gender, sexuality, age and ethnicity are theorised in social

dialectology and incorporated into data collection and analysis strategies (see, for

example, Eckert 1990, 1997, Meyerhoff 1996, Campbell-Kibler, Podesva, Roberts and
Wong, 2001, Fought 2006). Similarly, there have been major, but actually

complimentary advances in the sociolinguistic manipulation of the concept of

‘community’, with speech community (Patrick 2002), social network (Milroy 2002)

and community of practice (Meyerhoff 2002) models being applied depending on the

nature of the particular enquiry – the latter two represent more recent approaches,

with social networks emphasising the role that speakers’ social embeddedness into

local communities plays in the maintenance of traditional dialect forms, and

community of practice approaches highlighting the linguistic customs that emerge

when people come together to mutually engage in a particular task. These levels of

contextual analysis have enabled social dialectology to engage in analysis at very

different scales, from, for example, a consideration of the extent to which the

world’s Englishes share linguistic features (Szmrecsanyi and Kortmann, in press) right

down to the linguistic practices of a small group of ‘uncool’ girls in a Californian high

school (Bucholtz 1999).

Rural versus urban:

Given that one of the main aims of social dialectology was to discover the orderly

heterogeneity of the speech community, searching for (and finding) such order in

cities - what seemed like some of the most socially turbulent, heterogeneous and

diverse communities in the world - was always going to be a powerfully persuasive

strategy for the new discipline. Consequently, the abandonment of traditional

dialectological data collection methods went hand in hand with the abandonment of

the investigation of rural areas (with an important early exception). In the popular
imagination, cities were sites of diversity, conflict, contact, complexity, variation,

change. Rural areas, by contrast, are often portrayed as the insular, the isolated, the

static, and in some parts of the West as (attractive) idylls of peace, tranquillity and

safety. That this urban-rural dichotomy is rather problematic (see, further, Britain, in

press, c) was actually amply demonstrated in the very earliest social dialectological

work – in Labov’s analyses of both urban New York City (in The Social Stratification of

English in New York City (Labov 1966, 2006)) and rural Martha’s Vineyard (Labov

1963/1972). Labov argued that the Lower East Side of New York City represented ‘a

much more complex society’ (Labov 2006: 3) than Martha’s Vineyard, although

ultimately social diversity in the city was distilled down to the variables of age, class,

ethnicity and gender - factors which are also some (but not all) of the salient

dimensions of social diversity in Martha’s Vineyard too (Labov 1972: 4-6). There, in

this largely rural community, if we set aside the White Vineyarders, residents of

Portuguese, Native American and other miscellaneous ethnicities make up half if not

more of the population (Labov 1972: 6), even before we take into consideration a

small resident population coming originally from the Mainland and large numbers of

tourists. In addition these populations are not distributed geographically evenly

across the island, and are, naturally, engaged in a diverse range of socioeconomic

activities. As the results of Labov’s analysis demonstrated, the community showed

considerable sociolinguistic diversity with respect to age, location, occupation,

ethnicity, orientation towards the island as well as desire to stay on the island or

leave (1972: 22, 25, 26, 30, 32, 39). In terms of social and linguistic structure,

Martha’s Vineyard hardly fits the rural stereotype of quiet and sleepy pastoralism, or

of traditional dialectological NORMs, as Labov’s analysis so succinctly showed. By

contrasting a highly rural area with a highly urban one, his work can be seen as a
clear demonstration that there are large-scale social(-linguistic) processes which are

perhaps most obviously and vividly expressed in cities but are not confined

politically, sociologically or epistemologically to an urban context.

Core versus periphery

There has long been a focus in dialectology on the location of dialect regions,

examining both the core areas of those regions which share a large number of

dialect features, as well as, in contrast, the peripheries of those regions where the

influence of the centre is weakest, where changes emanating from that centre are

slower to be adopted, and which show some affinities with dialect forms from other

regions. Most core areas are situated around large urban centres which dominate

their economic and cultural hinterlands, and both in the very earliest work and in the

most recent, the location of regions and the examination of the dialects at their core

has been central to dialectological work. Ellis, for example, at the very start of his

survey of variation in anglophone Britain (1889: 3), detailed how the country was

broken down into Divisions, Districts and Varieties, motivated by dialect phonology,

and Wright (1905: 1) confronts this same issue in the second sentence of his English

Dialect Grammar. More recently, Trudgill (1999: 83, 84) has highlighted ‘a predicted

possible scenario for the division of the major regional varieties of English English for

the next century’. In parallel with developments in human geography, however, the

focus on regions went out of fashion during the quantitative era that coincided with

the beginnings of variationist sociolinguistics, with the 1970s and 1980s consequently

representing a relatively sparse period in the development of geographically-

informed dialectology (see, further, Britain 2002, in press a, in press b). More

recently, the region has returned with a vengeance in dialectology: there has been a

recognition that as distinctive dialect diversity is being lost at the very local level in

many Western countries, emerging, at the same time and as a result of mobility and

intra-regional migration, are more supra-local, regional dialects within which a core

of structural non-standard features are shared (e.g. Milroy, Milroy and Hartley 1994,

Watt and Milroy 1999, Watt 2002, Britain 2005b, 2009, Vandekerckhove 2009,

Hornsby 2009). Watt (2002), for example, found that the non-standard variants [e:]

and [o:] of the variables (ei) and (ou) respectively, typical of Northern England, were

taking over in Newcastle from the much more locally current vernacular [ɪə] and

[ʊə] variants (with standard forms used by an insignificant minority of (mostly middle

class) speakers).

Between these apparently homogenising regional varieties are boundaries and

transitions, well-mapped through the enterprise of traditional dialectology and its

isoglosses – geographically marking areas that are linguistically distinct - but relatively

rarely explored in variationist approaches to dialectology. Part of this lack of enquiry

has been due to an underlying dissatisfaction with the isogloss (derived in the early

days from analyses of single words based on single responses from a single speaker in

a single location), which has been replaced in more recent work by the transition

zone, demonstrating that, rather than sharp boundaries, the areas between regions

are characterised by gradations of interdialectal diversity (see Chambers and Trudgill

1980, Britain 2001). It has also become apparent that a socially richer understanding

of regions as arenas of economic and cultural practice can help us distinguish

between different types of ‘isogloss’, such as between those that are simply

reflections of the advance of ongoing geographical diffusion of linguistic innovations

and those which truly are watersheds between different social, cultural, economic

and geographical regions.

The contemporary dialectological research agenda

Dialectology is today a diverse field, and I conclude this entry by briefly surveying

some of the discipline’s areas of contemporary research focus. In some senses,

dialectology has begun to converge with and penetrate a number of subdisciplines of

theoretical linguistics, to the extent that dialectological practices have been absorbed

into the agendas of those other fields. So, for example, there has been a meeting of

minds with some theoretical syntacticians who have begun not only to incorporate

evidence from non-standard dialects in their theoretical work, but also take on

board issues such as inherent variability and the need to be cautious about the scope

of intuitions (see, for example, Adger and Smith 2005, Börjars and Chapman 1998,

Bresnan, Deo and Sharma 2007, Cornips and Corrigan 2005a, 2005b, 2005c, Henry

2002, 2005, Rupp 2005, Wilson and Henry 1998). One especially notable example of

this work is the development in the Netherlands of SAND (Syntactische atlas van de

Nederlandse dialecten) (e.g. Cornips and Jongenburger 2001 for a methodological

perspective) following the collaboration, both in terms of theoretical development

and methodological application, of theoretical linguists and social dialectologists in

the production of a modern atlas of Dutch language variation.

Similarly, phonetics and dialectology have together fused the new discipline of

sociophonetics, applying advanced acoustic analysis to continuous, vernacular non-

standard dialect data, and thereby uncovering patterns of fine grained socially

indexical variation of which we were previously unaware (e.g. Docherty and Foulkes

1999, Docherty, Foulkes, Milroy, Milroy and Walshaw 1996); theoretical

phonologists have, likewise, engaged more readily with dialectological data, especially

within the approaches of usage-based and exemplar phonology (e.g. Bybee 2006,

Pierrehumbert 2001, Hay, Nolan and Drager 2006) and optimality theory (e.g.

Uffmann 2007) - the interactions have extended also to linguistic typology (e.g.

Szmrecsanyi and Kortmann, in press, Trudgill 2002).

Another recent development has been technology-driven. Advances in computerised

cartography and the application of quantitative methodologies to dialectological data

have led to exciting work in the computer modelling and processing of variable

dialect data (e.g. Shackleton 2007, Nerbonne and Heeringa 2007) as well as the

development of visually appealing and pluridimensional dialect atlases and other

forms of dialect map-making (see Lameli, Kehrein and Rabanus, in press, for a state-

of-the-art review of language and dialect mapping). Technological advances have also

meant that it has become easier and safer to store and make readily available large

corpora of digitised spoken dialect data which are not only proving to be a rich

source of evidence for contemporary research on variation and change, but will also

provide (and are already doing so in a few studies) extremely useful real-time

evidence for future generations of dialectologists (see, for example, Sankoff and

Blondeau (2007)’s work on real time change in Montreal French). Dialectology today
can in many ways be seen as laying the foundations for a much richer historical

linguistics of the future.

A recognition that dialectology was overly concentrated on static individuals in their

local communities has led to a strong line of research examining the dialectological

consequences of mobility and diaspora, considering such issues such as dialect

levelling (see, for example, Kerswill 2003, Britain 2009, Vandekerckhove 2002, 2009),

dialect contact (Trudgill 1986), second dialect acquisition (Chambers 1992,

Tagliamonte and Molfenter 2007), new dialect formation (Trudgill 1986, 2004;

Kerswill and Williams 2000), as well as the interethnic diffusion of the dialect forms

of new migrant communities (Fox 2007, Khan 2007, Britain and Fox, in press,

Torgersen, Kerswill and Fox 2008). The research on new dialect formation in post-

colonial contexts (e.g. in the Anglophone southern hemisphere) has also, for

example, triggered a resurgence of interest among contemporary scholars in the

evidence found in the traditional dialectological work since the latter represents the

only information available on the relevant non-standard varieties spoken at or

around the time of colonisation (and in doing so has dispelled some of the myths

surrounding how these varieties have developed). Finally, interest in dialectology has

come to the fore once again because of the recent deconstruction of ‘space’ and

‘place’ in the sociolinguistic literature (e.g. Britain 2002, in press a, b; Johnstone 2004,

in press a, b). Drawing heavily from recent debates in human geography, dialectology

is, in this line of research, going back to its roots in the more spatially-oriented work

of the 19th century pioneers, but doing so in a more contextualised and socially

richer way.
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