Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology

The Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology, Volume 2, expands on the coverage of both regions and methodologies in the investigation of nonlinguists' perceptions of language variety. New areas studied include Canada (anglophone and francophone), Cuba, Hungary, Italy, Korea, and Mali, and most prominent among the new approaches are studies of the salience of specific linguistic features in variety identification and assessment. As in Volume I, the reader will find in these chapters everything from the statistical treatment of the ratings of dialect attributes to studies of the actual discourses of nonlinguists discussing language variety. Dialectologists, sociolinguistics, ethnographers, and applied linguists who work in areas where language variety is a concern will appreciate the findings and methods of these studies, but social scientists of every sort who want to understand the role of language in the cultural lives of ordinary people will also find much of interest here.

Glenn Martinez, University of Arizona, Tuscon, on Linguist List 14.1383, 2003:
This second volume of the Handbook is a welcome addition to the literature on folk linguistics. Its most laudable characteristics is the plethora of practical and theoretical innovations that it inserts into this burgeoning field of linguistic inquiry. The novelty of the works included in the volume cover everything from methods to analyses to theoretical reflections. These innovations considerably enrich the field. New methods focusing on content-analysis and metalinguistic discourse, for example, allow for the incorporation of discourse analysis principles in the field. New analysis including the study of imitation and dialect judgements open the field to the most recent advances in acoustic phonetics. New contexts including the investigation of communities in exile, ethnolinguistic minorities, and fractured political spaces forcefully injects sophisticated social theory into the field. Each and every one of the studies in the volume exponentially multiplies the possibilities of the field of perceptual dialectology. It is my hope that researchers will agree with this assesment, and that they will coordinate efforts in order to establish a professional organization and a periodical publication dedicated exclusively to this exciting field of linguistics.