Dialectology

Dialectology is the study of language variation. Traditionally, this has largely been the province of dialect geographers, who concentrated on the speech of the linguistically conservative rural population in order to map regional differences. More recently, however, interest has shifted to urban speech, and sociolinguists have correlated linguistic variables with other variables such as age, social class, sex and ethnic background. Dialectology not only provides a thorough exposition of these two approaches - their histories, methodologies and significant results, drawn from studies of a…