Topics in Dialectal Variation concentrates on studies that represent new methodological solutions to, or fresh perspectives into, the study of linguistic variation. The papers range from new applications of diffusion studies, through perceptual dialectology and folk linguistics, to innovative methods used in statistical linguistics and language technology. Problems of language planning are also discussed, and some of the studies presented here make use of theoretical and methodological approaches of neighbouring disciplines ending up with cross-disciplinary applications.

Table of contents:

Introduction

Alexander T. Bergs: Spreading the word: Patterns of diffusion in historical dialectology

Marion Krause, Valentina Lublinskaja, Christian Sappok: Russian speakers' dialect image: A perceptual study

Ana Kuzmanović: Historical linguistics meets sociolinguistics: An account of phonological change in Western Romance varieties on the Iberian Peninsula

Alexandra N. Lenz: Clustering linguistic behaviour on the basis of linguistic variation methods

Danielle Löw: Finding groups in data: Results of multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis for language attitudes in Pitmedden (Aberdeenshire)

Harri Mantila: State borders making new languages out of dialects: The case of the standardization of Meänkieli

Kathryn Remlinger: What it means to be a Yooper: Identity, language attitudes and variation in Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula

Beat Siebenhaar, Martin Forst, Eric Keller: Speech synthesis of dialectal variants as a method for research on prosody

Hiroto Ueda: Patternized configuration of geolinguistic data: Application to Spanish lexical variation

Index of languages and dialects Subject index

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