ABSTRACT
The development of dialect studies during the late nineteenth century was greatly facilitated by the simultaneous development of a set of techniques for undertaking surveys of linguistic usage and of other variables associated with language (attitudinal etc.). During the intervening century, a large body of literature on the mechanics and requirements of language surveys has built up, and a large number of surveys have been carried out, some dialectological, some more general and in some cases macrolinguistic in character. The depth and scope of coverage of these surveys has varied greatly, in terms of the range of aspects of the language(s) with which they have dealt, in terms of the geographical and social constraints placed on selection of speakers for the survey, and in terms of the density of sampling across each population surveyed. Early works in this tradition dealt predominantly with geographical dialects, mainly rural, of familiar European languages-often using very small and unrepresentative samples of informants (see also DIALECTOLOGY).
