Dialectology

Dialectology, the study of geographical differences within the same language, has a long tradition that predates modern linguistics. In the nineteenth century in particular, data from the local and regional dialects of Europe were collected with a view to establishing language families and identifying the branches of family trees (sometimes, it must be said, from nationalistic rather than purely scientific motives).

In the absence of reliable recording equipment, obtaining information about how language varied from one place to another was difficult, and researchers were often reliant on impressionistic data collated from non-specialists. Marburg-based dialectologist Georg Wenker’s early attempts to document spoken dialect across Germany, for example, were based on some 45,000 questionnaires returned from schoolmasters between 1877 and 1887: the sheer volume of data meant that only a fraction of Wenker’s corpus was ever properly exploited.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century Jules Gilliéron attempted to obtain more reliable first-hand data by training a grocer, Edmond Edmont, to conduct dialectological interviews with informants in 639 rural French villages, using a simple pre-IPA transcription system to record his results. Edmont’s findings were published as the Atlas Linguistique de la France (ALF; ‘Linguistic Atlas of France’) between 1902 and 1910. Half a century later, a team of researchers led by Harold Orton at the University of Leeds used similar methodology to Gilliéron, and again focused largely (though not exclusively) on rural villages for the Survey of English Dialects (SED), published between 1962 and 1971. The detailed data on local variation in each of these surveys have been presented as dialect maps, and in some cases isoglosses have been drawn, separating areas using one form from areas using a different one for the same referent (see the example for the verb ‘to peep’ in Figure 11.1).

It is important to remember that the primary aim of the dialectological surveys was to collect and record local variants before they died out, not to provide an accurate snapshot of variation throughout the country. The bias towards rural English villages in the SED, for example, was consistent with the aim of locating conservative speech forms, but entirely unrepresentative of a country which had been predominantly urban since the mid-nineteenth century. The informants selected, similarly, were anything but a representative cross-section of the English population at the time. Because of their associations with traditional (and often dying) trades, and the specialist vocabulary that went with them, NORMs (non-mobile older rural males) were targeted as ideal SED informants, as they had been by the ALF, for which only 60 out of some 700 informants were female.