2 - The Feline Territory of Language

Summary

The chapter ’The Feline Territory of Language’ shows us how we can approach online language variation with dialectology and outlines the steps to take for a dialectological description of a regional language variety, ranging from dialect data collection to dictionary-making. Using cat-related headwords and survey questions as examples, we look at how the data is collected and presented in the Survey of English Dialects and the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects. The chapter then moves on to dialect lexicography, with cats illustrating the approaches of the EDD, the OED, and the Urban Dictionary, leading us into online dialectology and its use of computers to collect, analyse, and display the data. The last section of the chapter covers phonetics, including its acoustic and articulatory branches. Instead of the usually studied human sounds, however, it takes cat vocalisations to illustrate what to do in phonetics.