Countering the urbanist agenda in variationist sociolinguistics: dialect contact, demographic change and the rural-urban dichotomy

In variational linguistics, the concept of space has always been a central issue. However, different research traditions considering space coexisted for a long time separately. Traditional dialectology focused primarily on the diatopic dimension of linguistic variation, whereas in sociolinguistic studies diastratic and diaphasic dimensions were considered. For a long time only very few linguistic investigations tried to combine both research traditions in a two-dimensional design – a desideratum which is meant to be compensated by the contributions of this volume. The articles present findings from empirical studies which take on these different concepts and examine how they relate to one another. Besides dialectological and sociolinguistic concepts also a lay perspective of linguistic space is considered, a paradigm that is often referred to as “folk dialectology”. Many of the studies in this volume make use of new computational possibilities of processing and cartographically representing large corpora of linguistic data. The empirical studies incorporate findings from different linguistic communities in Europe and pursue the objective to shed light on the inter-relationship between the different concepts of space and their relevance to variational linguistics.

English in England

The intention of the present volume is to unite the research of a range of scholars who have been working on features of non-standard, vernacular English which show an areal distribution, i.e. which cluster geographically across the world. Features common to an area can be due to (i) shared dialect input, (ii) common but separate innovations after settlement, or (iii) area-internal diffusion from one variety to another and/or others. The relative weighting of these factors is an important topic in the book and is a key focus in the 17 chapters. The book is divided into two large blocks, the first one consisting of case studies (8 chapters) and the second with features complexes (9 chapters). The former look at major anglophone locations from an areal perspective while the latter examine linguistic categories and features with a view to determine whether these could be areally based or not.