Dialectology is a branch of linguistics concerned with the study of dialects, or varieties of a language. It is closely related to sociolinguistics, the study of language in its social context, and can be considered a subfield of this larger area of inquiry. Dialectology is primarily interested in the regional and social distribution of linguistic features, investigating the diversity of language and how it is used in different parts of the world.
The field of dialectology emerged in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as scholars began to document the diversity of languages in Europe and elsewhere. One of the earliest and most influential works in this field was the book Dialectology, written by the German philologist Georg von der Gabelentz in 1891. Von der Gabelentz argued that language variation should be studied from an empirical, rather than a theoretical, perspective. He also argued that language variation should be studied in its social context, taking into account factors such as gender, occupation, and regional background.
Since the time of von der Gabelentz, dialectology has developed into a highly interdisciplinary field, drawing on methods from linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and other disciplines. Dialectologists now study language variation from a wide variety of perspectives, including phonetic, phonological, syntactic, and semantic analysis. Dialectologists are also increasingly interested in how language variation is affected by contact between different languages and dialects, as well as by the influence of the media and other forms of communication.
Dialectology has had an important impact on many areas of linguistics, including language typology, language change, language contact, and sociolinguistics. It has also been used to document endangered languages and to study language variation in different geographical areas. Dialectology is a growing field, and new techniques and technologies are continually being developed to further our understanding of language variation.
References
Gabelentz, G. von der. (1891). Dialektologie: Einleitung in die vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft. Leipzig: S. Hirzel.
Hickey, R. (2010). Dialectology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Milroy, J. & Gordon, M. (2003). Sociolinguistics: Method and Interpretation. Oxford: Blackwell.
Shnukal, A. (2013). Dialectology: An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Dialect Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.