Despite its rather general title, Studying dialect is intended as an introduction to the study of dialectal variation in the English language. The approach taken is a historical one, as the reader is familiarized with the development of the field of English dialect studies since its beginnings. The book is organized into ten thematic chapters. Each of them, written in pedagogic fashion and including terminological clarifications where pertinent, closes with a further reading section. Additionally, five of the chapters include suggestions for more or less modest research projects that can be realistically pursued by students.
Chapters 1 and 2 focus on English dialect lexicography, from Laurence Nowell's Vocabularium Saxonicum in the sixteenth century to recent dictionaries and glossaries, including some nonacademic works. Almost as a side note, a few pages of chapter 2 offer a brief overview of studies on English dialect morphosyntax starting with Ellis at the end of the nineteenth century.
Chapters 3–5 deal with linguistic cartography. The first of these chapters focuses on Georg Wenker's and Jules Gilliéron's linguistic atlases of Germany and France in the nineteenth century. Chapter 4 addresses the motivations behind these and subsequent projects and their impact in the broader philological scene, which, beyond methodology, included shedding light on contemporary questions about the nature and historical development of languages. Chapter 5 concentrates on the development of English linguistic cartography, from Ellis to recent dialectometric studies, highlighting the role of IT in shaping the discipline.
Chapters 6–8 concern sociolinguistics and its impact in the field of dialect studies. Chapters 6 and 7 explore the origins and influence of the Labovian paradigm in studies on dialectal variation in English. Chapter 8 delves into the dispute (mostly over methods) that eventually took place between sociolinguists and traditional dialectologists, as well as into how this controversy helped shape the modern field of dialect studies.
Chapter 9, though referring specifically to perceptual dialectology in its title, actually has a broader thematic scope. It deals, in general, with beliefs and attitudes toward English dialects, from William of Malmesbury's comments on northeastern English in the twelfth century to judgments elicited by modern, sociolinguistically informed studies, as well as with how such beliefs and attitudes can affect linguistic behavior. The fourth section of the chapter focuses on perceptual dialectology as the study of people's beliefs about the geographical patterning of speech, highlighting the constant methodological renewal of the discipline since Dennis Preston's early work in the 1980s.
Chapter 10 covers geolinguistics, roughly as envisioned by Jack Chambers and Peter Trudgill. Specifically, this chapter concentrates on the study of the relation between language change and geographical space, with special attention being given to the Northern Cities Shift.
Overall, this ambitious book is a much welcome introduction to the study of dialects, which should be useful even to readers not interested particularly in English. Despite a few conceptual issues (e.g. the very notions of dialect and language could have been defined more precisely) and debatable claims (e.g. ‘Sociolinguistics belongs to modern structuralist linguistics,’ p. 177), the book accomplishes its main purpose exceptionally, being a valuable resource for linguistics students and teachers, who will surely benefit from its informativeness, clarity, abundant visuals, and suggestions.
