36.2427, Reviews: (Dia)Lects in the 21st Century: Susanne Wagner, Ulrike Stange-Hundsdörfer (eds.) (2025)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-36-2427. Sat Aug 16 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.2427, Reviews: (Dia)Lects in the 21st Century: Susanne Wagner, Ulrike Stange-Hundsdörfer (eds.) (2025)

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Date: 16-Aug-2025
From: Daniel Strogen [973256 at swansea.ac.uk]
Subject: Typology: Susanne Wagner, Ulrike Stange-Hundsdörfer (eds.) (2025)

Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-1181

Title: (Dia)Lects in the 21st Century
Subtitle: Selected Papers from Methods in Dialectology XVII
Series Title: Language Variation
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Language Science Press
           http://langsci-press.org
Book URL: https://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/447

Editor(s): Susanne Wagner, Ulrike Stange-Hundsdörfer

Reviewer: Daniel Strogen

SUMMARY
(Dia)lects in the 21st Century: Selected Papers from Methods in
Dialectology XVII is an edited volume compiled by Susanne Wagner and
Ulrike Stange-Hundsdorfer. The volume comprises sixteen papers from
the seventeenth Methods in Dialectology conference, held in 2022.
Broadly speaking, the papers address contemporary issues in the field
of dialectology, with particular attention given to the application of
methodologies. As such, the organisation of the volume is thematic but
with a clear methodological focus: the first two sections group papers
by research tools and data types, while the latter two group papers by
their sociolinguistic focus and theoretical orientation.
The opening section, ‘Geolinguistic methods and big data in
dialectology’, contains four papers that all use large datasets,
quantitative approaches, and geospatial analysis, but to different
ends. Baxter’s ‘Extracting “non-standard” data from the Twitter API’
explores the potential of social media data for corpus-based analysis,
here applied to African American English (AAE) syntax. Building on
this digital-corpus approach, Baxter and Stevenson’s ‘Ain’t +
infinitive verb in Black/African American English’ takes a more
targeted view, presenting the first stage of a comprehensive atlas of
AAE syntax and examining the distribution of the ain’t + infinitive
structure relative to didn’t + infinitive. Shifting from English to
German, Blaßnigg, Kaiser, Mauser, and Niehaus’ ‘The Atlas of
colloquial German in Salzburg’ reports on an ongoing large-scale
survey documenting variation from local dialects to near-standard
German, showing how traditional atlas work can integrate modern
data-collection methods. Finally, Sekeres, Wieling, and Knooihuizen’s
‘A cognitive geographic approach to dialectology’ moves from
production to perception, investigating how both geographic distance
and “cognitive distance” (speakers’ mental estimates of spatial
separation) shape perceptual dialect differences. Together, these
papers illustrate the range of “big data” sources now available to
dialectologists, from social media corpora to large-scale surveys, and
how such data can support both production- and perception-oriented
research.
The second section, ‘Corpus-based studies and dialect change’,
presents five papers using corpora to examine how dialects change over
time, often in response to contact or shifting social contexts.
Hirano’s ‘A directional shift in linguistic change’ analyses
longitudinal data from an English-speaking expatriate community in
Japan, showing how dialect contact can redirect change trajectories
over time. Nove and Sadock’s ‘Minimal minimal pairs moves to the
heritage language context’, comparing vowel length contrasts in Polish
Central Yiddish with the understudied Unterland (Transcarpathian)
variety, thus contributing to the documentation of endangered
dialects. Adopting a community-study perspective, Pabst, Brunet,
Chasteen, and Tagliamonte’s ‘Tracking language change in real time’
reflects on methodological challenges in following Toronto speakers
from later life into retirement, an age range often overlooked in
change studies. Siewert, Scherrer, and Wieling’s ‘Corpus-based Low
Saxon dialectometry’ takes a long-term view, charting similarity and
change in Low Saxon from the 19th century to the present, while
Burkette and Antieau’s ‘Leaner, cleaner, and full of attitude’ traces
the methodological evolution of the Linguistic Atlas Project from
intensive, hours-long elicitation sessions to its present-day hybrid
format. Collectively, these papers highlight how corpus methods can
capture both historical and contemporary change, as well as the
methodological adaptations needed to study it.
The third section, ‘Dialectology, linguistic identity, and social
factors’, shifts focus from methodology to the interplay between
dialect use, speaker identity, and sociocultural variables. Jahns’
‘Das ist dann schon total cool zu sagen, Machanot’ introduces the
linguistic-positioning task, a new methodological tool for probing how
speakers perceive and rationalise their own and others’ linguistic
choices. Post’s ‘Regional prosodic variation in the speech of young
urban Russians’ investigates whether traditional regional prosodic
differences persist in younger speakers in Moscow and Perm, linking
production patterns to broader questions of urban identity. Takemura’s
‘How important is information about grandparents when selecting a
dialect speaker?’ examines the Japanese haenuki (“native-born”)
criterion, a three-generations-in-place requirement, and its role in
defining dialect speakers in survey contexts. Although working in
different linguistic and cultural settings, all three studies explore
how identity and social criteria mediate the perception, production,
and definition of dialects.
The final section, ‘Theoretical approaches and innovations in
dialectology’, engages with conceptual and methodological advances in
the field. Dollinger’s ‘Dialectology as “language making”’ critiques
anti-pluricentric perspectives in German dialectology through the lens
of ‘language making’ (Krämer et al., 2022), identifying a
long-standing “One Standard German Axiom” (OSGA) that frames German as
a single, self-contained entity and delegitimises non-dominant
standard varieties. Kathrein’s ‘Es werden im wesentlichen [sic!] nur
Worten aufgenommen...’ examines three layperson-created dialect
collections from Tyrol to investigate how non-specialists
conceptualise and demarcate their dialects in relation to the standard
language, providing an empirical counterpoint to Dollinger’s more
theory-driven critique. Sunga, Prokić, and Chen’s ‘Applying the
state-of-the-art tonal distance metrics to a large dialectal dataset’
assesses four methods for calculating tone distances in dialectometry,
addressing the long-standing neglect of tone in phonetic distance
measures despite its global prevalence. Closing the volume, Yurayong,
Pimvunkum, and Naksuk’s ‘Convergence and divergence of tone paradigms
across Tai dialects in the 21st century’ applies such quantitative
methods to Tai dialects spoken across Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar,
Thailand, and Vietnam, demonstrating their utility for mapping
large-scale areal patterns. Together, these papers showcase the
theoretical, methodological, and empirical breadth of contemporary
dialectology.
EVALUATION
Overall, (Dia)lects in the 21st Century is a timely contribution,
reflecting both the breadth of current research in, and the increasing
methodological diversification of, dialectology (Chambers & Trudgill,
1998). The editors have curated a volume that includes both
traditional and emerging methodologies, offering insights into
geospatial analysis, corpus methods, identity-focused research, and
theoretical critique. Moreover, the inclusion of papers that cover a
wide range of linguistic varieties - from AAE to Tai dialects -
highlights the volume’s commitment to showcasing dialectology as a
global field (Boberg et al., 2018).
One of the volume’s key strengths is its methodological range. The
first two sections demonstrate how advances in data collection and
processing are enabling fine-grained quantitative analyses on a scale
that would have been logistically unfeasible in early dialectology
(Nerbonne, 2018). The “big data” studies in Part I, for instance,
highlight how both production and perception can be examined using
data sources such as social media corpora and measures of cognitive
distance, while the corpus-based papers in Part II offer valuable
models of tracking change across communities and historical periods.
This range of approaches will be particularly useful for
dialectologists seeking to integrate new tools into established
frameworks.
The volume is not without some limitations, though these are in part a
reflection of its nature as a conference proceedings covering a wide
field. While the editors’ thematic grouping aids navigation, the
overall coherence is somewhat uneven. In some sections, papers share
only a broad thematic umbrella rather than a tightly defined research
agenda. This is most evident in Parts III and IV, where contributions
grouped by sociolinguistic focus and theoretical orientation display
considerable diversity in their approaches; the range of languages and
topics, while stimulating, can occasionally dilute thematic unity.
That said, the diversity of perspectives arguably outweighs this
slight loss of cohesion, offering a richer sense of the breadth of
current work in dialectology.
In addition, the absence of a concluding chapter or editorial
synthesis means that cross-cutting themes, such as the relationship
between methodological choice and the types of sociolinguistic insight
produced, remain implicit rather than explicitly drawn out. Such a
synthesis could have strengthened the book’s utility by providing an
integrated set of takeaways. A further challenge is uneven
accessibility. While many contributions are clear and well
contextualised, others assume familiarity with specialised techniques.
This is not unusual for a conference volume, but it may limit its
reach among graduate students or researchers entering dialectology
from adjacent fields. On the other hand, for established scholars in
dialectology, these papers will be an asset rather than an obstacle.
The editors largely succeed in their stated aim of providing 'a
valuable resource for linguists, researchers, and anyone interested in
the complex and ever-changing landscape of human language.' The volume
effectively captures the current diversity of dialectological
research, though the accessibility varies depending on reader
background, as noted earlier.
Looking forward, the volume's most significant contribution may lie in
its methodological contributions. Several papers introduce techniques
that could be applied beyond their original contexts - the
linguistic-positioning task in Part III, the tonal distance metrics in
Part IV, and the corpus-based approaches in Part II all offer
frameworks that future researchers can adapt and refine. More broadly,
the volume demonstrates how traditional dialectological questions can
be approached through innovative methodological lenses, suggesting
productive directions for the field's continued evolution.
REFERENCES
Boberg, C., Nerbonne, J., & Watt, D. (2018). Introduction. In C.
Boberg, J. Nerbonne, & D. Watt (Eds.), The handbook of dialectology
(pp. 31–55). Wiley Blackwell.
Chambers, J. K., & Trudgill, P. (1998). Dialectology (2nd ed.).
Cambridge University Press.
Krämer, P., Vogl, U., & Kolehmainen, L. (2022). What is “language
making”? International Journal of the Sociology of Language,
2022(274), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1515/ijsl-2021-0016
Nerbonne, J. (2018). Methods: Introduction. In C. Boberg, J. Nerbonne,
& D. Watt (Eds.), The handbook of dialectology (pp. 352–355). Wiley
Blackwell.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Daniel Strogen is a PhD candidate at Swansea University, specialising
in Welsh language shift. His research focuses on patterns of language
decline among new Welsh speakers, employing mixed methods approaches
informed by sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics. He holds degrees
in English Language, Primary Education, and Social Research Methods,
and has published short fiction alongside his academic work. His
broader interests include dialectology, language attitudes, and
language policy.

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