The first group of chapters in this book is devoted to matters of theory. We will, on the one hand, consider theories that have been elaborated within the field of dialectology itself. On the other, we will evaluate the contributions made to dialectology by theories from other domains of linguistics. Some of the latter set of theories have had a significant impact on the ways in which we conceptualize the notion of dialect, as well as how we describe dialects and classify them into superordinate groupings with respect to the languages of which dialects are said to be subspecies. We will see how dialectology and philology have contributed in their turn to theories of language, even in the case of theories whose exponents do not acknowledge, or may not even be aware of, that contribution. The following chapters will make it clear that linguistics as we recognize it today would probably be markedly different had so many paths in synchronic and diachronic language study not first been broken by scholars who devoted their careers to the study of dialect variation and relatedness, initially among European languages but later among languages from all the inhabited continents.
It has sometimes been claimed that dialectology is pre‐theoretical, or atheoretical. Although the assertion that any sort of dialectology could be carried out in a theoretical vacuum could not be easier to counter, is not hard to see why the belief persists. Until fairly recently, the professed mission of many dialectologists was simply to describe and catalog linguistic phenomena, rather than to try also to explain the genesis of these phenomena and the mechanisms by which they are transmitted from speaker to speaker across space and time. It was seen by many practitioners of dialectology to be more pressing in the immediate term to observe speech and language as they were actually being used out there in the world than it was to seek profound truths about the nature of language from more abstract philosophical perspectives. Translating this stance into action was to a significant degree motivated by a growing awareness and concern that the traditional dialects were vanishing, and that a failure to document them before they disappeared would mean irrevocably walling up a window onto the past. The prospect of imminently losing access to traditional forms of speech that could link us more directly to the world of our distant ancestors provided a powerful spur. It inspired scholars, individually or in teams, to go to huge lengths to set down, systematically and scrupulously, the rich detail of lexical, phonetic, phonological, morphological, and syntactic variation in the speech and language of people who were otherwise marginalized because of their lack of education, sophistication, or “breeding.” Dialectology gave, as never before, a voice to untutored rural dwellers, those seen as uncorrupted by modernity and urban life, and whose language was as untainted as it could be by the effects of the pressure to conform to institutionally imposed linguistic standards.
The erstwhile dialectological focus on the what, rather than the why and how, might be likened to large‐scale data‐gathering programs in disciplines such as zoology, botany, or astronomy. Cataloging the diversity of insects, flowering plants, galaxies, or exoplanets that have not yet been named or classified is a vital first step in understanding how the systems in which those entities operate are structured and how they function. It would be rash to assume that our theories of how those systems work are watertight until we have sampled the universe of variation as exhaustively as our finite resources will permit. Yet there are linguistic theorists who would argue that from the descriptive point of view, we essentially know all we need to know about variability in certain languages, and that dialect diversity in those languages is in any case largely irrelevant to the central enterprise of the field. It is perfectly valid, they would argue, to make pronouncements about the grammatical properties of an entire language by examining just one of its dialects—which is almost always the standard variety, if one exists—and not consulting any speakers at all. Why would one go to all the trouble of asking other people about their language, if one can use one’s own native‐speaker intuitions as a source of data, or get the information one needs from published sources?
Dialectology, according to views of the above kind, has little to offer “serious linguistics.” The dialectologists’ preoccupation with regional and social variation in language production has been viewed as a harmless enough trait, but spending even part of a career studying this aspect of performance (which I have heard dismissed, in paraphrase of John McCarthy’s aphorism, as mere “froth on the surface of language”) has hitherto generally not been thought a worthy pursuit for the theoretician. The proper subject matter of linguistics, on this view, is the set of abstract principles that govern how sentences are constructed, or the constraints that determine how phonological units such as syllables or feet or tonemes may be strung together. The focus on lexis in many dialectological surveys bolstered a perception that dialectologists and philologists were not really concerned with phenomena in the phonological or grammatical domains, and given that in many cases, the questionnaires designed to elicit dialect lexis dwelt on terminology pertaining to occupations such as agriculture, animal husbandry, or traditional arts and crafts, it is easy to see why many researchers working in other subareas of linguistics formed the impression that the methods and underlying conceptual framework of dialectology had stalled decades earlier. Accusations of “golden ageism” were also frequently leveled at dialectologists, probably owing to a tendency in some quarters for ideologies concerning the supposed purity or uninterrupted lineages of traditional dialects to bias scholars in such a way that they downplayed the influence of relevant societal factors on the historical trajectories of languages and their dialects (e.g., marginalizing the evidence suggesting that geographical and social mobility were considerably more prevalent in former centuries than we often assume, such that we tend to believe today that mobility is a modern phenomenon; see e.g., Long 2013; Whyte 2000; also Milroy 1992).
The criticisms of dialectology discussed above are not wholly without foundation. But the field has moved on a great deal in recent decades. New theoretical insights and methodologies from cognate disciplines such as sociolinguistics, human geography, and social and evolutionary psychology (e.g., Buchstaller and Alvanides 2013; Cohen 2012) are helping contemporary dialectology to flourish, and the findings of studies in archaeology and population genetics (e.g., Heggarty et al. 2005; Winney et al. 2012), along with innovations in mapping and ‘Big Data’ analysis techniques (e.g., Huang et al. 2015; Grieve, this volume), are being fused with dialectological data in ways that mutually strengthen all of the contributing disciplines. It is of benefit to linguists of every stripe that new theories of language evolution, acquisition, structure, and use are crystalizing out of the interplay among these diverse approaches to human characteristics and behaviors.
We commence the Theory section of this volume by taking the long view of dialectology’s emergence from the earlier philological tradition, and how historical linguistics simultaneously grew as a parallel offshoot, with all three disciplines cross‐fertilizing one another. In his chapter, Raymond Hickey argues that the boundaries of dialectology are a matter of terminological convention rather than the result of the field having intrinsically sharp edges, and that the scope of dialectology is in any case subject to change as interconnections with other disciplines are forged. Similar perspectives are offered by Jacques Van Keymeulen in his discussion of the history and current status of the dialect dictionary (Ch. 2). The advent in recent years of searchable large‐scale multimedia repositories of dialectal data has transformed the dialect dictionary from a static, cut‐and‐dried record of painstaking scholarship carried out over years or decades, to a dynamic “living” resource that can be regularly updated with new research findings and data gathered from the general public using innovative methods such as crowdsourcing apps (e.g., Goldman et al. 2014).
The potential for ...
