The Handbook of Dialectology - (Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics) by Charles Boberg & John Nerbonne & Dominic Watt (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The Handbook of Dialectology provides an authoritative, up-to-date and unusually broad account of the study of dialect, in one volume. Each chapter reviews essential research, and offers a critical discussion of the past, present and future development of the area.

• The volume is based on state-of-the-art research in dialectology around the world, providing the most current work available with an unusually broad scope of topics
• Provides a practical guide to the many methodological and statistical issues surrounding the collection and analysis of dialect data
• Offers summaries of dialect variation in the world's most widely spoken and commonly studied languages, including several non-European languages that have traditionally received less attention in general discussions of dialectology
• Reviews the intellectual development of the field, including its main theoretical schools of thought and research traditions, both academic and applied
• The editors are well known and highly respected, with a deep knowledge of this vast field of inquiry

From the Back Cover

"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, Canada

"It'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, UK

Over 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.

About the Author

Charles Boberg is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. His research focuses on variation and change in North American English, particularly Canadian English and accents in film and television. He is the author of The English Language in Canada: Status, History and Comparative Analysis (2010) and a co-author of the Atlas of North American English (with William Labov and Sharon Ash, 2006).

John Nerbonne worked at HP Labs, the German AI Center, and the University of Groningen, where he was head of Digital Humanities. He is currently an honorary professor in Freiburg. Nerbonne works in quantitative linguistics, using computational and statistical methods. He is a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, was president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 2002, and a Humboldt prize winner in 2013.

Dominic Watt is Senior Lecturer in Forensic Speech Science at the University of York, UK. His research interests are in forensic phonetics and linguistics, speech perception, sociophonetics, and language and identity studies. He is co-author of English Accents and Dialects (with Arthur Hughes and Peter Trudgill, 2012), and co-editor of Language and Identities (with Carmen Llamas, 2010) and Language, Borders and Identity (2014).