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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; see Britain 2002, 2009b, 2010, in press a). 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 et al. 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 article 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

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 pronunciation specialists, dictionarymakers, grammarians and the like largely compelling us not to use non-standard forms, but it was not until scholars began to react to the work of the nineteenth-century Neogrammarians that serious and focused 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 V of On Early English Pronunciation, a large survey of over 1,100 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 USA, 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 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’s comments (2006: 274-80) 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. Second, 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, focusing 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 nineteenth-century development of New Zealand English in Britain [2005a, 2008; Gordon et al. 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

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, Chambers 1992; Foulkes et al. 1999; Fox 2007; Horvath 1985; Roberts 2002; Trudgill 1986).