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Methods in Dialectology is a venerable institution, having started in 1972 in London, Western Ontario, Canada. This book is a collection of papers presented at Methods XVI in Tachikawa, Japan, in 2017. It was the first time Methods took place in Asia. In this volume, the emphasis is on diverse methods and diverse research questions. Many of the papers focus on language innovation, language change, corpus studies and linguistic atlas from different perspectives. At the same time, methodological innovation is very much in focus. Its emphasis meant that several papers showcased cutting-edge quantitative techniques that allow dialectologists to address questions that had been thought impossible to answer only a few years ago.

Traditional dialects have been encroached upon by the increasing mobility of their speakers and by the onslaught of national languages in education and mass media. Typically, older dialects are “leveling” to become more like national languages. This is regrettable when the last articulate traces of a culture are lost, but it also promotes a complex dynamics of interaction as speakers shift from dialect to standard and to intermediate compromises between the two in their forms of speech. Varieties of speech thus live on in modern communities, where they still function to mark provenance, but increasingly cultural and social provenance as opposed to pure geography. They arise at times from the need to function throughout the different groups in society, but they also may have roots in immigrants'speech, and just as certainly from the ineluctable dynamics of groups wishing to express their identity to themselves and to the world. The future of dialects is a selection of the papers presented at Methods in Dialectology XV, held in Groningen, the Netherlands, 11-15 August 2014. While the focus is on methodology, the volume also includes specialized studies on varieties of Catalan, Breton, Croatian, (Belgian) Dutch, English (in the US, the UK and in Japan), German (including Swiss German), Italian (including Tyrolean Italian), Japanese, and Spanish as well as on heritage languages in Canada.

This volume of papers from the 14th International Conference on Methods in Dialectology, held at the University of Western Ontario (Canada), 2 to 6 August 2011, brings together recent methodological innovations and current research on the study of dialects and language variation. The research contributions are authored by a range of new and established scholars from different countries working on a number of languages and language varieties. The volume is divided into sections dealing with phonetics and phonology, morphology and syntax, ethnicity and identity, dialect cartography, methods, techniques as well as variation and change.

This volume of papers from the 13th International Conference on Methods in Dialectology, held at the University of Leeds in 2008, collects together current research and recent methodological developments in the study of dialects by new and established scholars. It is organised into themed sections reporting on historical dialectology, dialect literature, the production of dialect maps and atlases, and the collection and organisation of material for dialect dictionaries and corpora. Perceptual dialectology and dialect intelligibility are also featured, and there are linguistic analyses of dialectal data from many language varieties.

Nonstandard varieties of languages have recently become an object of new interest in scholarly research. This is very much due to the advances in the methods used in data collection and analysis, as well as the emergence of new language-theoretical frameworks. The articles in this volume stem from the 11th International Conference on Methods in Dialectology (Methods XI, August 2002, Joensuu). The theme for this conference was'Dialects across borders'. The selection of contributions included in this volume demonstrates how various kinds of borders exert major influence on linguistic behaviour.

The Sixth International Conference on Methods in Dialectology was hosted by the Department of Linguistics in the University College of North Wales, August 3-7, 1987. The meeting was held jointly with that of the Summer meeting of the American Dialect Society. This volume contains a substantial selection of the papers presented. The papers are wide-ranging in their coverage, with a satisfying leaning towards the practical matters of survey and field-work methodology, to the application of statistical techniques in analysis of data, and to computational methodology in the presentation of results, particularly in atlas form. The conference was designed to reflect the current concerns of dialectologists, as they exploit these methodological tools in the twin contexts of insights which derive from sociology via sociolinguistics, and their awareness of the interplay between synchronic variation and linguistic change. The papers in this volume combine all these aspects of variation study, though the mix varies with the individual authors'concern. In all, these proceedings mirror the wide range of interests which characterise the practice of dialectology as a research discipline, and well illustrate the dilemma of the pedant who seeks an inviolate line of demarcation between'dialectology'and'sociolinguistics'. The defining criterion for dialectology, perhaps, is its central concern with variation in the spatial parameter, and with diffusion through space and time, in addition to refinement of the data by an enhanced awareness of the significance of factors of communal social structure.