One of the rather neglected fields of Late Modern English studies is English Dialectology. This
volume includes sixteen papers based on presentations of the workshop «Wright's English Dialect
Dictionary and Beyond» at the 15th ICEHL in Munich (2008). The book is divided into three
sections: The first two refer to the genesis and the structure of the EDD respectively. The
third part throws light on other dictionaries from OED3 to the Bank of Canadian English and
on research related to the Survey of English Dialects. This is the first edition of dialect
studies that moves Wright's remarkable dictionary in the centre of interest at the same time
seeing his contribution to dialectology critically from a modern point of view. Three of the
papers are introductions to the book's sections written by two of the editors. They not only
represent the state of the art on Wright's personal achievement as lexicographer and an
in-depth analysis of the EDD's complex structure but also includea survey of the development
of English dialectology in the early 20th century. The book's general motivation is to promote
the methodological reflection of dialectology in the face of recent corpus linguistics and
digitised dictionaries.
