Dialect change and variation: the Atlas Lingüístico de la Península Ibérica

Linguistic geography came into being as an auxiliary method of historical linguistics; subsequently as it established itself as an autonomous discipline it gradually shed its links to diachronic studies. With the development of sociolinguistics from the nineteen-sixties onwards, the data provided by projects in linguistic geography again became relevant to studies concerning language change. This paper examines the usefulness of language atlases for analysing language change in real time, taking the Atlas Lingüístico de la Península Ibérica (ALPI) as an example. A comparison of some of the ALPI data with atlases of more limited geographic scope produced from the fifties onwards will serve to illustrate the benefits of such analyses. Data in linguistic geography studies can be used to track changes over time as well as to determine the direction of their spread over space. The illustrations given show how language atlases may offer an invaluable data source for the study of language change and the history of individual
language varieties.