Linguistic Atlases

• Published in: The Handbook of Dialectology pp. 57 - 72
• Main Author: Kretzschmar, William A
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Hoboken, NJ, USA John Wiley & Sons, Inc 04.12.2017
• Subjects: American linguistic atlas effort; American structuralism; geographic information systems; language variation studies; linguistic atlas surveys; linguistic theory; map collections
• ISBN: 9781118827550; 1118827554
• DOI: 10.1002/9781118827628.ch3

This chapter focuses mostly on the American linguistic atlas effort, but the principles explained apply to many atlases. The idea for linguistic atlases was born in the nineteenth century among the Neogrammarians, at the very beginning of modern linguistics as a field of study. Before World War II, linguistic atlases were popular, and at the same time American structuralism as represented by the work of, for instance, Leonard Bloomfield, grew to describe many of the central ideas of modern linguistics. The theoretical achievement of linguistic atlas surveys in America came through Kurath's Word Geography and Pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States, which were followed considerably later by Kurath's theoretical treatments of urban speech and areal linguistics. The original method to make data available from the American linguistic atlas was presentation on maps. The creation of maps has been revolutionized by computer methods in what are generally called geographic information systems (GIS).