Dialect lexicography and the standard language ― words for snow and suburban Tokyo dialect ―

This paper is concerned with dialect glossaries of locations near Tokyo which have close relationships with standard language dictionaries. The lexicon of a dialect is worth studying in its own right; however if it is investigated in a wider context, it will bring more fruitful results. The contribution of dialect lexicography can be divided into four categories: (1) Lexicon as an index of culture, (2) Lexicon for contrastive study (3) Lexicon and style (4) Lexicon in dynamic relation to standard language. These four approaches will be discussed in sections 1 to 4 in this paper. The order is from simpler description of individual words to complicated contrastive and historical analysis of vocabulary as a whole. The attempt in this paper is based on Japanese language data, but the methodology and technical terms can be applied to many languages. The relationship between dialects and standard can be studied against a larger theoretical background of sociolinguistic typology of standard languages.