The Dilemma of the Reliability of Geolinguistic and Dialectological Data for Sociolinguistic Research. The Case of the Andalusian Demerger of /θ/
The Dilemma of the Reliability of Geolinguistic and Dialectological Data for Sociolinguistic Research. The Case of the Andalusian Demerger of /θ/

Summary/Abstract: Overt theoretical and methodological differences between, on the one hand, dialectology and geolinguistics and, on the other hand, sociolinguistics make quite difficult the essential task of using data from the former two disciplines to help the latter one complete present research on the speech communities, particularly when it is about reconstruction of the past of current varieties. The problem is therefore to which extent are geolinguistic and dialect monograph data reliable to retrospectively follow both the history of a given variety and a particular linguistic change. Building on rich results of complex analyses using macrosocial, mesocial and small scale variables to explain speech variation, which reveal emergence of a new variety in southern Spain, retrospective comparison with geolinguistic and dialect monograph data discloses ideological drawbacks regarding representation of both the speech community and the linguistic structure, as well as a quite troubling contradiction between geolinguistic and dialect monograph data.

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