On language study: what is Dialect and Dialectology?

Source

Today, after some days of not posting here, I decided to talk about dialect and its study. It is a very important sociolinguistic subject.

Dialectology is the study of linguistic dialect. Dialect on the other hand is a regional or social variety of a language characterized by its own phonological, syntactical, and lexical properties O Grady et also (n.d). It is a distinctive form of a language which is associated with some social and regional variations. It differs from other varieties of a language by its own linguistic features such as vocabulary, pronunciation, grammar.

Dialectology is the study of dialects. It studies the linguistic variation existing between and among dialects.

Dialect is a variety of language that signals where a person comes from and which according to Ugwuona (2019) is usually interpreted geographically (regional dialect). She goes further to observe that dialect has some application in relation to a person's socal background (class dialect) or occupation (occupational dialect).

Although the systematic study of language variation had its effective beginnings in Europe after 1850 (Ugwuona, 2019), it was not until the mid to nineteenth century that there was very little evidence of a coherent and systematic endeavour to formally study dialects (Chambers and Trudgil, 1998).

Prior to the time of the argument from Chambers and Trudgil, Ugwuona (2019) opines that there had been literary references to dialect differences, and, of course, much work by dictionary markers, grammarians and the like largely compelling us not to use non standard forms, but it was not until scholars began to react to the work of the 19th century Neogrammarians that serious and focused dialectological research began.

References

Ugwuona, C. (2019). Dialectology. Lecture note.