The Handbook of Dialectology

Dialectology, the study of how and why language varies from place to place, comes brilliantly to life with this comprehensive, state of the art handbook. Grounded in history yet filled with cutting-edge methodology, research findings and personal insights from top researchers in the field, this book gives scholars and students the ideal reference manual for studying and understanding dialects in the 21st century.Professor Sali Tagliamonte, University of Toronto, CanadaIt's all here - an enormously helpful and brilliantly well-planned volume, by the world's very top dialectology researchers. The Handbook has everything that needs to be known about regional variation in language, including the history of its study, its manifestations, its causes, and its consequences.Professor Peter Trudgill, University of East Anglia, UKOver the last 150 years the field of dialectology has seen a great broadening and diversification of subject matter, including the range of languages and dialects studied, methodological approaches and theoretical perspectives used, and its links with allied disciplines. The Handbook of Dialectology meets this challenge by providing an authoritative, up-to-date account of the study of dialect from around the world.Organized into three sections-theory, methods, and data-the editors, along with an international team of leading scholars, explore the broad field of dialectology and a wide range of related subtopics.The Handbook considers dialect variation in the world's most widely spoken and commonly studied languages, including a variety of language families that have traditionally received less attention in general discussions of dialectology.Chapters address the most important issues, review the essential research, and offer a critical discussion of the past, present, and future developments of the subfield. In addition, the book begins with an introductory essay on the nature of dialect variation, and the history and current status of the discipline of dialectology.