Escobar, Anna María. 2008. “Viewpoint from Sociolinguistics and Contact Linguistics on the role of Dialectology in Modern Linguistics”. Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 1 (1), 197-209. (original) (raw)
In the latter decades of the 20 th century, historical, typological, dialectological, and sociolinguistic research all contributed to demonstrating the limitations of focusing exclusively on language-internal synchronic data, and these and other disciplines that share a bottom-up perspective acquired respectability as participants in theorybuilding. In the 21 st century, there is a renewed appreciation of the potential for such research to address questions that are central to linguistic theory. Dialectology is today a field in which the social changes occurring in human societies are naturally taken into consideration, and includes not only the study of dialects in the traditional sense but also the study of social dialects and second-language varieties. Dialectology has thus evolved into a rich and complex field which is ideally positioned to make important contributions to the process of building theories of language that are firmly based on empirical data.
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