Quellen und Methoden der historischen Dialektologie

Historical dialectology has a long tradition in the German-speaking world as the study of historical dialects, understood as spoken, highly localized language varieties. As such, it has developed methods that aim at meticulously analyzing traces of speech in historical written texts and at inferring the structure of spoken varieties of the past. These rather qualitative methods are complemented by a newer understanding of what historical dialectology is, which is influenced by the notion of dialect as used in the anglophone world, i.e. as a variety of language that is not necessarily geographical in nature. This strand of historical dialectology does not aim at reconstructing idealized historical spoken varieties, but at analyzing language variation in the past more generally. It builds on a tradition of quantitative research in historical linguistics that is not primarily dialectological in the narrower sense and lends itself to harnessing the wide range of corpus-linguistic methods available.