Language and a Sense of Place

This book explores twenty-first century approaches to place by bringing together a range of language variation and change research.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the study of language and place, focusing on how 'place' has featured in language variation and change research. Specialist researchers explore new methods for regional analysis and examine how processes of language variation and change have been affected by time and space.Place has always been central to studies of language, variation and change. Since the eighteenth century, dialectologists have been mapping language features according to boundaries - both physical and institutional. In the twentieth century, variationist sociolinguists developed techniques to correlate language use with speakers' orientations to place. More recently, perceptual dialectologists are examining the cognitive and ideological processes involved in language-place correlations and working on ways to understand how speakers mentally process space. Bringing together research from across the field of language variation, this volume explores the extent of twenty-first century approaches to place. It features work from both established and influential scholars, and up and coming researchers, and brings language variation research up to date. The volume focuses on four key areas of research: processes of language variation and change across time and space; methods and datasets for regional analysis; perceptions of the local in language research; and ideological representations of place.