 Until the latter half of the 19th century, dialect areas were defined intuitively. The first attempts to systematic observations were initiated by the Neogrammarians and their study of Indo-European languages. The Neogrammarians, as you know, were a group of German philologists associated with the University of Leipzig in the 19th century. Their establishment of specific laws of sound changes led to the assumption that dialect studies would be relevant for language classification. The result was the development of what they called dialect geography or dialectology. Since these initial steps, numerous projects in dialect geography have been conducted all over the world. Let's look at these in more detail. Let's outline their main methods and problems and list them in more detail. Let's start with Germany. Now, the first dialect geography was begun in Germany by a man called Georg Venker. In the 19th century, Venker lived from 1852 to 1911. He was born in Düsseldorf and became a librarian at our university here in Marburg in 1877. In 1888, he became the head of the German language atlas now called Deutscher Sprachatlas at Marburg University. Now, what did he do? Venker sent a fixed list of sentences to as many German scholars as he knew, asking them to transcribe the sentences in their local dialect. Now, the wealth of data, however, turned out to be extremely problematic because Germany is not that small and it was even larger then. Venker was forced to limit his analysis to selected variants of the words to be transcribed. Nevertheless, in 1881, the Sprachatlas, the German language atlas, became the first linguistic atlas around. It is hosted here at Marburg. Here are some examples of the so-called Venker sentences. Here is a map of Germany plus Austria and Switzerland, the main areas where Germany is spoken. Well, and here are some of the sentences. Let's listen to this one. The Gaul man is made pure of East Braten and in Köln waterfall. Now, this is what the man says. The good old man is with his horse through the ice broken. Here it is. And into the cold water fallen. And this is the German sentence. Venker asked many scholars to translate and then transcribe. Let's now look at North America. The plan for mapping dialects of North American English was first set in motion in the 1920s. And the two key figures in this respect are, of course, on the one hand, Hans Kurat. Well, where can I put his name? Kurat. Hans Kurat. The second one is, of course, William Labov. And William Labov was born in 1927. He's the key figure behind the current Atlas of North American English. Although it appears that much of the territory of the United States was covered from then on from Kurat's initial attempt to classify dialects, fieldwork was often done without being published. Let us look at the achievements of American dialect studies in more detail. Here you see a map of North America with the main studies and main atlases being represented. For example, that was an Atlas. La always stands for Language Atlas. There was an Atlas that covered this area, which is, of course, New England. Or if, for example, you look at this Atlas, you will find an Atlas of the Atlantic States. Here, this Atlas, this area, of course, is associated with the Mexican Gulf, so GS stands for the Gulf States. Let's take another one. Here we have the Pacific West. And so you see, we have a number of Atlas studies and atlases that were developed, but no Atlas about the entirety of the territory of the United States, let alone Canada. Now, this was achieved by Labov study that was published in 2004, the Atlas of North American English. And this is the first real attempt to cover the entirety of the United States, plus Canada in terms of a systematic phonological comparison of speakers. In the United Kingdom, we have dialectology closely connected with the Survey of English Dialects, a massive linguistic research project that was undertaken in the 1950s and 1960s. The aim was to create a comprehensive database of the dialect spoken in the rural communities in England. The Survey's field workers visited several hundred villages and interviewed about a thousand people. The subjects selected were those that were most likely to speak the traditional uncontaminated dialect of their area. So they were generally in their 60s or even older, had left education and had not travelled much from their village. Let's listen to an example. Well, here you have an example of a speaker from West Yorkshire, one of the northern varieties, I will point them out in a second. Now, let's listen first. Well, when we were wed at first, and we lived down at school then, a little else, and it's a bit of a garden up front, you know, but it were not one-up, one-down, and a cellar, and so it was worth work, and I'll put him his jack-up, you know, to go to his work at meet, and put it at table in a red anchorage, you know, I'll put it in a red anchorage, and I'll put it at table ready for more. Well, this speaker exhibits some very interesting phonological properties, some of which can be associated with the great vowel shift, the famous sound shift that affected the English language during the Middle English time. In the United Kingdom, in particular in England, we can define a number of phonological dialects. For example, we have a dialect that is spoken in the capital London, which is, of course, Cockney, and a more recent development which is associated with Cockney and covers the estuary of the river Thames, is called Estuary English. Well, some people define this as maybe as a new standard of present-day English. We'll discuss this in another unit. Then, of course, we have something like Geordie in the north, the dialect associated with Newcastle. We have here the, well, perhaps a little bit larger, but well, let's leave it like here. Yorkshire and the northern dialects, a special type is then, of course, Scouse. That's a dialect used around Liverpool. Well, here's another interesting one in the area of Birmingham, the so-called Rummy dialect. There are more, but let's stop it here. The methods involved in dialect geography are the same as in many other branches of linguistics. Basically, we're concerned with methods of data recording and data analysis. However, the way the data is collected differs from other branches of linguistics, especially due to the amount of information that has to be collected. The main methods are questionnaires, where field workers interview their subjects on the basis of a questionnaire, and more modern examples of data collection. Well, this telephone is not really so modern anymore, so perhaps this can now be replaced by Web 2.0 technologies where you collect data via the Internet, where you record people via your smartphone and so on and so forth. Now, questionnaires can be defined in two ways. There is, on the one hand, the distinction between indirect versus direct methods of interviewing people. Most studies use the indirect question technique to encourage informants to give more natural responses. For example, a field worker could ask the question, what is this? And then the answer might be a sheet of paper. On the other hand, a field worker could show an object to a subject and ask the question, what do you call a pen? That would be a direct method. The direct approach was used by Georg Wencker in the German Sprachatlas. A second distinction can be drawn between formal and informal. The formal approach presents all the questions on a questionnaire in advance, and the field workers are bound to these questions. This approach dominated the British dialect surveys. The informal approach, by contrast, allows the field workers to freely name their questions as long as they elicit the desired response. This approach was preferred in North American dialectology, especially in the telephone studies by Laboff. Now, this telephone survey has been used very successfully at several points in the history of American dialectology. This example of a telephone interview exhibits Agatha R. from Cleveland in Ohio. Cleveland is a small, big city. Cleveland is the small version of Chicago, very ethnic, very separate areas. In spite of the substantial achievements of dialectology, it is difficult to produce maps of linguistic features. This is due to these problems that we have listed here. Now, one problem is the efficiency problem, which relates to the time. So, the aspect is time. How can we manage to interview thousands of people across a country within a limited range of time? The second problem concerns the people, the sampling of the people. So, we have to be very careful about aspects such as biological sex, aspects of age, of cultural background, ethnic background and so on. To get a precise and well-defined sample of people. The obsolence problem deals with, well, history as a key word. Surveys often involve a heavy concentration of rural and agricultural terms. In other words, in phrases that are no longer current because the speakers that have produced them no longer exist. So, language develops over time during our surveys. Well, and finally, the problems of reliability and validity. Now, the problem is very often a subjective one or impressionistic one. So, let's associate it with the word impression. Many of you know how difficult it is for linguists to agree upon one phonetic transcription for the same speaker. This phenomenon has been known since the 1960s of the last century.