Dialectology
Dialectology is a sub-field of
linguistics. It studies variations in
language based primarily on geographic distribution (as opposed to variations based on social factors, which are studied in sociolinguistics, or variations based on time, which are studied in
historical linguistics and the features associated with it). Dialectology treats such topics as divergence of 2 local
dialects from a common ancestor and synchronic variation.
William Labov is one of the most prominent researchers in this field.
Dialectologists are ultimately concerned with grammatical and syntactical features which correspond to regional areas.
Dialect studies began in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The idea of dialect studies began in
1876, by
George Wenker, who sent postal questionnaires out over Northern Germany. These postal questionnaires contained a list of sentences written in Standard German. These sentences were then transcribed into the local dialect, reflecting dialectal differences. Many studies proceeded from this, and over the next century dialect studies were carried out all over the world.
Traditional studies in Dialectology were generally aimed at producing dialect maps, whereby imaginary lines were drawn over a map to indicate different dialect areas. The move away from traditional methods of language study however caused linguists to become more concerned with social factors. Dialectologists therefore began to study social, as well as regional variation. The
Linguistic Atlas of the United States (
1930s) was amongst the first dialect studies to take social factors into account.
This shift in interest consequently saw the birth of
Sociolinguistics, which is a mixture of Dialectology and
Social Sciences.
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