Perceptual dialectology

Perceptual dialectology is the study of how people classify dialects, and the attitudes they hold towards regional and social variation in language. I have carried out several surveys in North East England which have revealed how 'the folk' inhabit a complex mental landscape in which perceived differences in speech map onto elements of the region's static and dynamic geographies. I have found that features such as roads, rivers, buildings and hills are identified by people as marking out, and sometimes even forming, cultural boundaries, and that territories on opposite sides of these boundaries are often associated with different forms of speech. Furthermore, when I compared these perceptual areas with 'production' areas (based on locally salient linguistic features) I found that the people of North East England appear to possess high levels of metalinguistic awareness about actual variation in space.