Containing all new material and published for the American Dialect Society's centennial celebration (1889-1989), this volume brings together in one place, as no previously published work has, current approaches to the general problems of language distribution and variation. The several chapters offer accounts of how questions are formulated and how data are collected, stored, and interpreted in the various research traditions of dialectology and sociolinguistics, particularly as they have been carried out by researchers associated with the American Dialect Society. |