Dialectology is the study of language variation. Traditionally, this has largely been the province of dialect geographers, who concentrated on the speech of the linguistically conservative rural population in order to map regional differences. Interest has shifted to urban speech, and sociolinguists have correlated linguistic variables with other variables such as age, social c...(展开全部)

When first published in 1980, Dialectology broke new ground by integrating urban dialectology (sociolinguistics), dialect geography and spatial variation into a cohesive discipline. In this second edition, the authors take account of the renaissance of dialect research in the last twenty years. They offer new sections on dialectometry and mapping variability, a revised section ...(展开全部)