Dialectology

Dialectology deals with such topics as divergence of two local dialects from a common ancestor and synchronic variation.

In the 1950s, the university undertook the Survey of English Dialects, which covered all of England, some bordering areas of Wales, and the Isle of Man.

However, Graham Shorrocks has argued that there was always a sociological element to dialectology and that many of the conclusions of sociolinguists (e.g. the relationships with gender, class and age) can be found in earlier work by traditional dialectologists.

[5] In the US, Hans Kurath began the Linguistic Atlas of the United States project in the 1930s, intended to consist of a series of in-depth dialectological studies of regions of the country.

The principal fieldworker for the atlas, Edmond Edmont, surveyed 639 rural locations in French-speaking areas of France, Belgium, Switzerland and Italy.

[8] In 1873, a parson named L. Liebich surveyed the German-speaking areas of Alsace by a postal questionnaire that covered phonology and grammar.

[10] Also in 1876, Georg Wenker, a young school librarian from Düsseldorf based in Marburg, sent postal questionnaires out over Northern Germany.

He later expanded his work to cover the entire German Empire, including dialects in the east that have become extinct since the territory was lost to Germany.

[11] The first treatment of Italian dialects is provided by Dante Alighieri in his treatise De vulgari eloquentia in the early fourteenth century.

After completing his work in France, Edmond Edmont surveyed 44 locations in Corsica for the Atlas Linguistique de la Corse.

More recently, under the umbrella of sociolinguistics, dialectology has developed greater interest in the ongoing linguistic innovations that differentiate regions from each other, devoting more attention to the speech of younger speakers in urban centers.

Some of the earliest dialectology collected data by use of written questionnaires asking informants to report on features of their dialect.

This methodology has seen a comeback in recent decades,[18] especially with the availability of online questionnaires that can be used to collect data from a huge number of informants at little expense to the researcher.

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?

"[19] The sociolinguistic interview may be used for dialectological purposes as well, in which informants are engaged in a long-form open-ended conversation intended to allow them to produce a large volume of speech in a vernacular style.

Spanish and Italian are similar and to varying extents mutually comprehensible, but phonology, syntax, morphology, and lexicon are sufficiently distinct that the two cannot be considered dialects of the same language (but rather developed from their common ancestor Latin).

An example of this is Sanskrit, which was considered the proper way to speak in northern India but was accessible only by the upper class, and Prakrit which was the common (and informal or vernacular) speech at the time.

In both areas—the Germanic and Romance linguistic continuums—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.

This is perhaps nowhere 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.

Another example is Norwegian, with Bokmål having developed closely with Danish and Swedish, and Nynorsk as a partly reconstructed language based on old dialects.

An example can be taken with Occitan (a cover term for a set of related varieties spoken in Southern France) where 'cavaL' (from late Latin caballus, "horse") is the diasystemic form for the following realizations: The pluricentric approach may be used in practical situations.