Dialectical studies

Traditional dialectology focused exclusively on the geographical dimension, while urban variationist studies have focused on a single city, and explored correlations between speech and extralinguistic factors (e.g. gender, social class).

It would be unfair to criticize traditional dialectologal surveys for not being representative of the general population: they did not set out to be so. But we do need nonetheless to interpret their findings with caution for other reasons. Firstly, fieldworkers asked informants which forms they used, but self-reporting is notoriously unreliable. The form an informant offers a fieldworker may not in fact be the form he/she uses most often, even though he/she may sincerely believe that it is. The method, moreover, makes little allowance for intra-speaker variation: all speakers vary in their usage, and the language one feels appropriate for answering questions posed by a stranger undertaking fieldwork is likely to be different from that used with intimates.

For these and other reasons, the isoglosses of dialect maps need to be seen as an idealization of data in which there are gradual changes over geographical space rather than abrupt boundaries between uses. Dialectological surveys provided a wealth of information about variation on a single dimension, that of geography, while keeping all other variables (age, sex, education, etc.) broadly constant. Their findings often yielded insights into the direction of change, but sociolinguists seeking to understand how change occurs had to take essentially the reverse approach, i.e. to hold the geographical variable constant by taking informants from a single place, and vary the other social variables. This was the task that two pioneers of variationist studies, William Labov and Peter Trudgill, set themselves in the 1960s and 1970s.