This is the end of the sixth year of publication of the Journal of Linguistic Geography, a project conceived by one of the founding editors, Bill Labov, more than a few years before its realization. Bill remains as Senior Editorial Advisor, and his original idea for the journal and his good advice during its fledgling years have helped this project along enormously.
As indicated in our last introduction, Prof. Francisco Moreno-Fernández of the University of Alcalá de Henares and Harvard University is now Co-Editor of the Journal, and his international experiences, contacts, and good advice have already contributed substantially to the growth and continuing quality of the Journal.
This number (6.2, 2018) is our first special issue and identifies a welcome trend in the field — the cooperation of professional geographers with linguists, typologists, sociolinguists, ethnographers, discourse analysts, and, of course, dialectologists. Although many articles in previous issues of the Journal have featured geographically sophisticated treatments of areal data, this issue is specifically devoted to this cooperation. In April of 2017, the URPP of the University of Zurich, in cooperation with ETH Zürich, the Swiss National Science Foundation, Zürcher Universitätsverein, and Congreso Stefao Franscini, sponsored the meeting “Spatial Boundaries and Transitions in Language and Interaction: Perspective from Linguistics and Geography” in Monte Verità, Ascona. A selection of those papers is presented here with the addition of the article by Bounds, which, although not presented at the conference, is well within its spirit.
Once several years ago one of us presented some sociolinguistic/dialectological work at a geography department symposium; after the presentation, one of the audience exclaimed, “Why, you’re just a geographer!” In spite of the “just,” that comment was taken as a compliment, a recognition that linguistic work was in fact the sort of thing in which professional geographers would like to be involved. Some might note that cultural geographers have always known this, and perhaps they have been, but new technologies, new data-collection opportunities, and newer quantitative techniques in the analysis and representation of spatial data have made this cooperation all the more obvious to both sides. We hope this will be evident in the articles in this special issue.
