Perceptual dialectology

It studies the way dialects, and individual dialect features, are perceived by speakers within a speech community. Real and imaginary linguistic differences, stereotypes of popular culture, local strategies of identification, and other factors combine to generate a conception of individual dialects, whose perceptual identities and boundaries may differ significantly from those defined by objective dialect methods. Dialects which identify where a person is from are called regional dialects, though other terms are used, e.g. ‘local’, ‘territorial’, ‘geographical’. Rural dialects are often distinguished from urban dialects, the unique complexities of the latter prompting the growth of urban dialectology.

Dialects which identify where a person is in terms of social scale are called social dialects or class dialects. More recently, the term SOCIOLECT has been used. Some languages are highly stratified in terms of social divisions, such as class, professional status, age and sex, and here major differences in social dialect are apparent. In English, the differences are not so basic, but it is possible to point to usages in vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation which are socially based, e.g. ain’t, which has in its time identified both working-class and upper-class (e.g. Lord Peter Wimsey) types. Such variants were generally ignored in regional dialectology, and would these days tend to be studied under the heading of SOCIOLINGUISTICS. Social dialectology is the application of dialectological methods to the study of social structure, focusing on group membership as a determinant of dialectal competence.

‘Dialect’ is also sometimes applied to the linguistically distinct historical stages through which a language has passed, and here the term historical or temporal dialect might be used, e.g. Elizabethan English, seventeenth-century British English. ‘Dialect’ has further been used to refer to the distinctive language of a particular professional group (occupational dialect), but more recent terms have come to be used to refer to social variations of this kind (e.g. REGISTER, DIAtype, VARIETY). The popular application of the term to the unwritten languages of developing countries (cf. ‘there are many dialects in Africa’, and the like) is not a usage recommended in linguistics.