Dialectology and the Study of Dialects

What is dialectology and what is the study of dialects?

My primary research interest is in (general) dialectology, which is usually defined as the study of dialects. However, the term dialectology is often associated with a narrower area of dialect study, namely the study of geographical variation of language (usually focusing on the old-fashioned, greatly deviated from the standard, mostly extinct local speech, with a historical orientation), instead of including all the relevant study areas which involves 'dialects'. What about contemporary dialects? What about the level of variation which is neither the base dialect nor the standard variety? The areas which the term dialectology may not cover for include dialect-standard interaction, new dialect formation etc. (see the figure above) are usually seen as part of Sociolinguistics and/or Historical Linguistics.

I myself am interested in learning more than just the areas which dialectology is traditionally associated with. Therefore, I tend to say I work on dialectology, but I am interested in the study of dialects, so that areas which are tradtionally excluded in the cover term dialectology are included too. Feel free to adopt this habit! The diagram above illustrates the possible areas which the study of dialects can involve (but not limited to).

Lastly, I have bracketed 'general' befeore dialectology above, on the first line. This is because I believe dialectology does not have to be language-specific (but of course there is nothing wrong with that if that's what you are interested in). Linguistic theories are built upon evidence and data from languages all over the world, why can't dialectology do the same? Dialectology has been language-specific for more than a century, it is time to move on to a cross-linguistic perspective!

By the way, I treat dialects as the speech spoken in one locality (i.e. a dot) in a linguistic atlas/ dialect survey. Furthermore, each locality can have different sociolects and idiolects. When I talk about a collection of dialects in a region, then I will address them as a dialect group. The way I use the term dialect also applies to Mundart (German), Patois (French) and 方言 (fong1jin4, fāngyán; Chinese).