Dialectology

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Dialectology (from Greek διάλεκτος, dialektos, "talk, dialect"; and -λογία, -logia) is the
scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It studies variations in
language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features. Dialectology
treats such topics as divergence of two local dialects from a common ancestor and synchronic
variation.

Dialectologists are ultimately concerned with grammatical and phonological features that
correspond to regional areas. Thus they usually deal with populations that have lived in certain
areas for generations, but also with migrant groups that bring their languages to new areas (see
language contact).

Commonly studied concepts in dialectology include the problem of mutual intelligibility in

defining languages and dialects; situations of diglossia, where two dialects are used for different
functions; dialect continua including a number of partially mutually intelligible dialects; and
pluricentrism, where what is essentially a single genetic language exists as two or more standard
varieties.

William Labov is one of the most prominent researchers in this field.

[edit] History
Dialect studies began in the latter half of the 19th century. The idea of dialect studies began in
1876, by Georg 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.
Joseph Wright produced the six-volume English Dialect Dictionary in 1905.

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.

In the 1950s, the University of Leeds undertook the Survey of English Dialects, which focused
mostly on rural speech in England and the eastern areas of Wales.
This shift in interest consequently saw the birth of Sociolinguistics, which is a mixture of
dialectology and social sciences.

[edit] Methods of data collection

Dialect researchers typically use questionnaires to gather data on the dialect they are researching.
There are two main types of questionnaires, direct and indirect.

Researchers using direct questionnaires will present the subject with a set of questions that
demand a specific answer and are designed to gather either lexical or phonological information.
For example, the linguist may ask the subject the name for various items, or ask him or her to
repeat certain words.

Indirect questionnaires are typically more open-ended and take longer to complete than direct
questionnaires. A researcher using this method will sit down with a subject and begin a
conversation on a specific topic. For example, he may question the subject about farm work,
food and cooking, or some other subject, and gather lexical and phonological information from
the information provided by the subject. The researcher may also begin a sentence, but allow the
subject to finish it for him, or ask a question that does not demand a specific answer, such as
“What are the most common plants and trees around here?”[1]

[edit] Mutual intelligibility

Main article: Mutual intelligibility

Some have attempted to distinguish dialects from languages by saying that dialects of the same
language are understandable to each other. The untenable nature of blunt application of this
criterion is demonstrated by the case of Italian and Spanish cited above. While some native
speakers of the two may on occasion enjoy some limited mutual understanding, few people
would want to classify Italian and Spanish as dialects of the same language in any sense other
than historical. Spanish and Italian are similar, but phonology, syntax, morphology, and lexicon
are sufficiently distinct that the two cannot be considered dialects of the same language.

[edit] Diglossia
Main article: Diglossia

Another problem occurs in the case of diglossia, used to describe a situation in which, in a given
society, there are two closely related languages, one of high prestige, which is generally used by
the government and in formal texts, and one of low prestige, which is usually the spoken
vernacular tongue. An example of this is Sanskrit, which was considered the proper way to speak
in northern India, but only accessible by the upper class, and Prakrit which was the common (and
informal or vernacular) speech at the time.

Varying degrees of diglossia are still common in many societies around the world.
[edit] Dialect continuum
Main article: Dialect continuum

A dialect continuum is a network of dialects in which geographically adjacent dialects are

mutually comprehensible, but with comprehensibility steadily decreasing as distance between the
dialects increases. An example is the Dutch-German dialect continuum, a vast network of
dialects with two recognized literary standards. Although mutual intelligibility between standard
Dutch and standard German is very limited, a chain of dialects connects them. Due to several
centuries of influence by standard languages (especially in Northern Germany, where even today
the original dialects struggle to survive) there are now many breaks in intelligibility between
geographically adjacent dialects along the continuum, but in the past these breaks were virtually
nonexistent.

The Romance languages— Galician/Portuguese, Spanish, Sicilian, Catalan, Occitan/Provençal,

French, Sardinian, Romanian, Romansh, Friulan, other Italian, French, and Ibero-Romance
dialects, and others—form another well-known continuum, with varying degrees of mutual
intelligibility.

In both areas - the Germanic linguistic continuum, the Romance linguistic continuum - the
relational notion of the term dialect is often vastly misunderstood, and today gives rise to
considerable difficulties in implementation of European Union directives regarding support of
minority languages. Perhaps this is no more evident than in Italy, where still today some of the
population use their local language (dialetto 'dialect') as the primary means of communication at
home and, to varying lesser extent, the workplace. Difficulties arise due to terminological
confusion. The languages conventionally referred to as Italian dialects are Romance sister
languages of Italian, not variants of Italian, which are commonly and properly called italiano
regionale ('regional Italian'). The label Italian dialect as conventionally used is more geopolitical
in aptness of meaning rather than linguistic: Bolognese and Neapolitan, for example, are termed
Italian dialects, yet resemble each other less than do Italian and Spanish. Misunderstandings
ensue if "Italian dialect" is taken to mean 'dialect of Italian' rather than 'minority language spoken
on Italian soil', i.e. part of the network of the Romance linguistic continuum. The indigenous
Romance language of Venice, for example, is cognate with Italian, but quite distinct from the
national language in phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon, and in no way a derivative or
a variety of the national language. Venetian can be said to be an Italian dialect both
geographically and typologically, but it is not a dialect of Italian.

[edit] Pluricentrism
Main article: Pluricentric language

A pluricentric language is a single genetic language that has two or more standard forms. An
example is Hindi-Urdu or Hindustani, which encompasses two main standard varieties, Urdu and
Hindi. Another example is Norwegian, with Bokmål having developed closely with Danish and
Swedish, and Nynorsk as a partly reconstructed language based on old dialects. Both are
recognized as official languages in Norway.

In a sense, the set of dialects can be understood as being part of a single diasystem, an
abstraction that each dialect is part of. In generative phonology, the differences can be acquired
through rules. An example can be taken with Occitan (a cover term for a set of related varieties
of Southern France) where 'cavaL' (from late Latin *caballu-, 'horse') is the diasystemic form for
the following realizations.

 Languedocien dialect: caval [kaβal] (L > [l], sometimes velar, used concurrently with
French borrowed forms chival or chivau);
 Limousine dialect: chavau [tʃavau] (ca > cha and -L > -u);
 Provençal dialect: cavau [kavau] (-L > -u, used concurrently with French borrowed forms
chival or chivau);
 Gascon dialect: cavath [kawat] (final -L > [t], sometimes palatalized, and used
concurrently with French borrowed forms chibau)
 Auvergnat and Vivaro-alpine dialects: chaval [tʃaval] (same treatment of ca cluster as in
Limousine dialect)

This conceptual approach may be used in practical situations. For instance when such a
diasystem is identified, it can be used construct a diaphonemic orthography that emphasizes the
commonalities between the varieties. Such a goal may or may not fit with sociopolitical
preferences.

[edit] The Ausbausprache — Abstandsprache —

Dachsprache framework
Main article: Ausbausprache, Abstandsprache and Dachsprache

One analytical paradigm developed by linguists is known as the Ausbausprache -

Abstandsprache - Dachsprache framework. It has proved popular among linguists in Continental
Europe, but is not so well known in English-speaking countries, especially among people who
are not trained linguists. Although only one of many possible paradigms, it has the advantage of
being constructed by trained linguists for the particular purpose of analyzing and categorizing
varieties of speech, and has the additional merit of replacing such loaded words as "language"
and "dialect" with the German terms of Ausbausprache, Abstandsprache, and Dachsprache,
words that are not (yet) loaded with political, cultural, or emotional connotations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectology