ABSTRACT
Perceptual dialectology makes the leap to the examination of overt attitudes and reactions to language, and, as such, serves as a linguistic subfield uniquely suited to the application of the planets of belief metaphor. In particular, the linguistic study of the perceptions nonlinguists hold about language variation and change, known as perceptual dialectology, allows for the systematic analysis of this type of interconnectedness by examining nonlinguists’ explicit beliefs about language and linguistic variation. Perceptual dialectology is another way of examining these same kinds of beliefs, in an explicit and overt way, and it has the potential to reveal much about the ways that people construct their linguistic planets of belief. The researcher must also consider how these linguistic entities are represented in the research products. American linguistics has a long history of being generally uninterested in non-production-based linguistic data.
