Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, Marjatta Palander, and Esa Penttilä (eds.), Dialects across borders

Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, Marjatta Palander, and Esa Penttilä (eds.), Dialects across borders. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. xii, 291, Hb $138.00.

This volume offers a selection of papers originally presented at the Eleventh International Conference on Methods in Dialectology held at the University of Joensuu, North Karelia, Finland in 2002. The conference's theme has been taken as the title of the book, and each of the essays included here explores the influence of borders on linguistic behavior. For readers who might assume this collection to represent only the tradition of dialect geography it is important to note that the editors had a rather expansive sense of “border” in selecting the essays, and as a result the contributors display a broad range of ways of conceptualizing borders and their influence. The papers are grouped thematically according to the types of borders they examine: Those in Part I deal with borders in the usual geographical sense, those in Part II explore borders that are more social or cognitive in character, and those in Part III investigate borders between languages. The editors open the book with an introduction that sketches the contents of each essay.