Historical Dialectology in the Digital Age

A survey of applications of digital methods and tools to explore the linguistic features of regional varieties in historical texts

Drawing on the resources created by the Institute of Historical Dialectology at the University of Edinburgh (now the Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics), such as eLALME (the electronic version A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English), LAEME (A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English) and LAOS (A Linguistic Atlas of Older Scots), this volume illustrates how traditional methods of historical dialectology can benefit from new methods of data-collection to test out theoretical and empirical claims. In showcasing the results that these resources can yield in the digital age, the book highlights novel methods for presenting, mapping and analysing the quantitative data of historical dialects, and sets the research agenda for future work in this field.

Bringing together a range of distinguished researchers, the book sets out the key corpus-building strategies for working with regional manuscript data at different levels of linguistic analysis including syntax, morphology, phonetics and phonology. The chapters also show the ways in which the geographical spread of phonological, morphological and lexical features of a language can be used to improve our assessment of the geographical provenance of historical texts.

- Lays out key corpus-building strategies for working with regional data at different levels of linguistic analysis: syntax, lexicon, morphology, and phonetics/phonology
- Shows how traditional methods of Historical Dialectology can benefit from new methods of data-collection to test out theoretical and empirical claims
Highlights opportunities and pitfalls for analysing the relation between sound systems and spellings