This article examines the effect of proximity on perceptual dialectological data gathered in Northern Great Britain. It underlines the key effect that proximity has on respondent mental maps of language variation, and demonstrates this by discussing area recognition levels and map‐based data. The article demonstrates that the effects of physical proximity can be modified by various factors. These factors include the ‘barrier effect’ of national borders such as the Scottish‐English border, along with other, more subjective, psychological boundaries such as the North‐South divide. In addition to demonstrating that these barrier effects increase the effect of proximity, this article will also show that proximity effects can be reduced by factors such as ‘cultural prominence’ (in which culturally important locations feature more prominently in mental maps of dialect areas).

There is a growing trend in regional dialectology to analyse large corpora of social media data, but it is unclear if the results of these studies can be generalized to language as a whole. To assess the generalizability of Twitter dialect maps, this paper presents the first systematic comparison of regional lexical variation in Twitter corpora and traditional survey data. We compare the regional patterns found in 139 lexical dialect maps based on a 1.8 billion word corpus of geolocated UK Twitter data and the BBC Voices dialect survey. A spatial analysis of these 139 map pairs finds a broad alignment between these two data sources, offering evidence that both approaches to data collection allow for the same basic underlying regional patterns to be identified. We argue that these results license the use of Twitter corpora for general inquiries into regional lexical variation and change.

argue for the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) in order to aggregate, process and display PD data.Using case studies from the UK and Germany, we present examples of data processed using GIS, and illustrate the future possibilities for the use of GIS in PD research.

This is a repository copy of Evaluating S(c)illy Voices: The effects of salience, stereotypes, and co-present language variables on real-time reactions to regional speech.

In traditional dialectology, linguistic variation is studied in relation to geographical space. Researchers first gather evidence of linguistic forms “in the wild”, before plotting the distribution of those forms on maps. This article describes a different approach to the study of variation, that of perceptual dialectology. Whereas dialectology focuses on the distribution of actual linguistic forms, perceptual dialectology looks at speakers’ beliefs about language. Specifically, it addresses the similarities or differences between the speaker’s own speech and that of other areas; examines the other dialect areas and where they are located; describes the characteristics of these dialects; and identifies the value-judgments that speakers make about their own dialects and those of others. Perceptions of language can be investigated in three different ways: either through “societal treatment”, “direct” approach, or “indirect” approach. This article examines attitudes and ideologies in the development of the English language, focusing on the Early Modern English period and the contemporary period.