Dialectology and Geolinguistic Dynamics

Reinhild Vandekerckhove
Table of contents

Geographical language variation is a relatively old research topic within linguistics. The discipline of (traditional) dialectology is rooted in the early 19th century. At the time it was closely connected to historical linguistics, since dialect study (mainly) served to reconstruct older stages of languages and processes of language change. From the 1960s onwards, cross-fertilization with a new discipline, viz. sociolinguistics, resulted in a make-over of traditional dialectology. Dialectologists assimilated sociolinguistic methodology and research interests and the discipline subsequently acquired a social dimension – and at times it seemed as if sociolinguistics was to ‘appropriate’ dialectology, and make it a subdiscipline of sociolinguistics. Today, the mass media and extensive geographical mobility have changed the position, functioning and perception of regional language to such an extent that the discipline faces new research challenges once again. This chapter primarily deals with present day research topics within dialectology (Section 3), but it also presents a concise history of the discipline (Section 2). It starts off with the delineation of the research topic (Section 1) and an attempt at defining the very notion ‘dialect’.

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