Introduction

Since the end of the 1990s, we have been calling for an integration of typological methods and insights into dialectological enterprises (e.g. Kortmann 1999; Anderwald and Kortmann 2002; Kortmann 2003, 2004). This new perspective informed among other things the Freiburg project on ‘English Dialect Syntax from a Typological Perspective’ (2000 to 2005), in which we aimed to explore morphosyntactic variation across the dialects of England in the light of results, methods and approaches from cross-linguistic variation. Besides the compilation of FRED (the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus, cf. Anderwald and Wagner 2007), this project has resulted in the publication of a number of (both qualitative and quantitative) corpus- (largely FRED-) based studies of individual morpho-syntactic phenomena (e.g. Anderwald 2002, 2009; Kortmann et al. 2005; Pietsch 2005; Hernandez, Kolbe and Schulz 2011). The present chapter contributes to the enterprise of accounting for linguistic variation in a unified way, along the lines of Croft’s (1990/2003) ‘integrative functionalism’ and Bisang’s call for an integration of typology, dialectology and contact linguistics (2004). It is also related to Chambers’ proposal of vernacular universals (2009, 2004) which has triggered a lively debate among dialectologists, variationists, and typologists in recent years (cf. Filppula, Klemola and Paulasto 2009; Kortmann and Szmrecsanyi 2011). Since our first proposals along these lines, other researchers have also started to take into account findings from typology (cf. e.g. Nevalainen, Klemola and Laitinen 2006; Trousdale and Adger (eds.) 2007; Siemund 2008, 2011; Dufter, Fleischer and Seiler 2009), and typological asides figure increasingly in studies of intra-language variation.

English (dialects) in the eighteenth and nineteenth century

From a linguistic point of view, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are very different from the preceding centuries in the history of English. The radical changes the (grammatical) system had been undergoing in the Middle and (though much less so) in the Early Modern English period had largely been completed:

As a result, attention in contemporary publications on the (state of the) English language shifted to new areas, and one area in particular: standardisation in the form of (prescriptive) codification (see for example Görlach 1999b: 462, 482; Rissanen 1999: 211; Beal 2004b: 329). For the first time in the history of the language, both pronouncing dictionaries and grammars were published that were intended for average people. While in early centuries Latin grammar had been the ideal towards which English grammar should orient itself, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries gave way to a more realistic position.