Perceptual dialectology
Study of how people perceive dialects / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about Perceptual dialectology?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
Perceptual dialectology is the scientific study of how ordinary individuals perceive variation in language—where they believe it exists, where they believe it comes from, how they believe it functions, and how they socially evaluate it.
Perceptual dialectology differs from ordinary dialectology in that it is concerned not with empirical linguistic understandings or discoveries about language itself, but rather with empirical research on how non-linguists perceive language, also known as folk linguistics, which includes how non-linguists perceive various accents, vocabulary usages, grammatical structures, etc. Such perceptions may or may not align with actual linguistic findings. Perceptual dialectology falls under the general field of sociolinguistics.
Common topics in the study of perceptual dialectology include the comparison of folk perceptions of dialect boundaries with traditional linguistic definitions, the examination of what factors influence folk perceptions of variation, and what social characteristics individuals attribute to various dialects.