Although Bloomfield published only one article and one book-review devoted specifically to dialectology, the study of dialects and their function in human communication was fundamental in his work. In his 1933 Language, four chapters deal in part or in whole with dialectology: 3, “Speech-communities”, 19, “Dialect Geography”, 22, “Fluctuation in Frequency of Forms”; and 27, “Dialect Borrowing”. In these, he drew extensively on the work of his predeccessors, especially on that of G.G. Kloeke in the Dutch-Flemish area. Furthermore, he made a major, though badly neglected, contribution to the analysis of dialects, by advocating and applying (in his article “Initial [k-] in German”, Language 14.178–186 [1938] a phonemic rather than a phonetic approach to the delimitation of dialect-areas and their historical interpretation.