Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology: Volume 1 (review)

As Dennis Preston states in his introduction, ‘there are many ways to skin a linguistic cat’ (xxiii). In this initial volume of a series on perceptual dialectology, he offers the reader a substantive overview of the historical and methodological issues behind one of those often-neglected ways: the investigation of folk perceptions of speech and language attitudes. P has compiled here a wide array of articles heretofore inaccessible to many language scholars, including some translations into English, making this text an informative, solid foundation for perceptual dialectology.

The text consists of 22 chapters allocated to three sections. Part 1 (Chs. 1–3) deals with the Dutch contribution to perceptual dialectological study. Part 2 (Chs. 4–10) addresses the debate among Japanese scholars over subjective vs. objective evidence for dialect borders, offering both a rich history of the methodological concerns involved in language perception study and detailed and thorough analyses of dialect areas in Japan. Part 3 (Chs. 11–22) abruptly shifts gears in its focus on more recent studies of language attitudes and the justification of folk perceptions of speech. Also included in this initial volume of the Handbook is an introductory chapter by P which does a solid job validating the rationale and applications of perceptual language study.

Ch. 1, ‘Informant classification of dialects’, is a translation of W. G. Rensink’s (1955) endeavor to construct a perceptual dialect map of the Netherlands based on a 1939 language survey. In Ch. 2, ‘Dialects’, Jo C. Daan (1970) investigates the possible intersections of production and perception boundaries of several Dutch-speaking regions; the chapter also provides a thorough rationalization for the need to investigate perceptual dialect boundaries. A translation of Ludger Kremer’s (1984) article on subjective vs. objective language borders in Ch. 3 provides perceptual evidence that speakers are subjectively aware of a language border between the Netherlands and Germany which had not been previously established as a border based on objective evidence. All studies in Part 1 of this text rely methodologically on the ‘little arrows’ approach (xxvi), a method which, with arrows, connects a participant’s speech community with an area and/or areas that the participant judges as similar to his/her speech. Participant judgments are then collected into groups to mark subjective speech boundaries. The ‘little arrows’ approach is explicated in some detail in P’s introduction and revisited in Chs. 9 and 10.

The chapters in Part 2 vary from Takesi Sibata’s (1958) contribution (Ch. 4), in which he argues that dialect consciousness does not necessarily reckon with the establishment of dialect boundaries, to Chs. 6 and 7, both translations of Yoshio Mase (1964a, b), in which Mase offers evidence suggesting that production and perception may instead be more closely linked. Also included in this section is a critique of the Japanese contributions to perceptual dialect study by Antonius A. Weijnen (1966, Ch. 9) in which he touts the little arrows method that he developed over alternative methods developed by Sibata and Willem A. Gootaers (1959). A bonus of Part 2 is a useful synopsis of the Japanese debate given by A. C. M. Goeman (1989) in Ch. 10.

In Ch. 11, ‘Classification of dialects by image’, Fumio Inoue (1995) argues that images of dialects may contribute a great deal to language change and the diffusion of such change. Furthermore, Inoue (Ch. 12, 1996) finds that folk perceptions of dialect boundaries are based on justifiable psycholinguistic foundations. In both of his chapters, Inoue streamlines the quantification methodology for dialect perception, utilizing a multidimensional scaling approach. Chs. 13–22 draw strongly on P’s earlier work on language attitudes from the 1980s and early 1990s. Contributions from Daniel Long in Chs. 13 and 14 offer the reader more analysis of dialect perception in Japan. Ch. 13, ‘Geographical perceptions of Japanese dialect regions’, examines dialect maps drawn by participants...