6533b86efe1ef96bd12cb243

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Dialects: Early European Studies

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The article begins with an overview of dialectology starting with dictionaries and grammars in Switzerland (forerunners) and in Bavaria (1821, 1827–1837). The tradition of dialect atlases beganworldwide with the data collection for the German linguistic atlas (1877–1888) by Georg Wenker. Research on Germanic dialects other than German began between 1841 and 1860 in Denmark, Norway, and Great Britain (also with dictionaries and grammars). It goes on to show that after French and Italian dialectology had concentrated on written dialect collections, several dialect grammars, e.g., for Paris and surrounding areas, appeared as from 1872, culminating in the enormous French dialect atlas ALF between 1902 and 1910. In Italy, two publications by Ascoli were sensational: (1) on Ladin in 1873, (2) on Franco-Provencal. At about the same time, a journal was founded and Jaberg and Jud's AIS survey undertaken. In Slavic dialectology, the first important publications were on Moravian, Belorussian, Polish, Serbian, and Russian between 1886 and 1915. A major impulse came from the International Congress of Slavists (Prague, 1929) where Lucien Tesniere, who had published a Slovenic dialect atlas in 1925, was charged with the project of a pan-Slavic linguistic atlas.