Compare methods

	Perceptual Dialectology	Variationist Sociolinguistics
Field	Linguistics	Linguistics
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1989	1972
Originator	Dennis R. Preston (building on Dutch and Japanese folk-dialectology traditions)	William Labov
Type	Folk-linguistic method for studying non-linguists' perceptions of dialects	Quantitative field study of socially conditioned linguistic variation
Seminal source	Preston, D. R. (1989). Perceptual Dialectology: Nonlinguists' Views of Areal Linguistics. Foris. ISBN: 9789067654487	Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic Patterns. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN: 9780812210521
Aliases	Folk Dialectology, Perceptual Dialect Mapping, Draw-a-Map Dialectology	Variationist Analysis, Labovian Sociolinguistics, Quantitative Sociolinguistics
Related	4	4
Summary	Perceptual dialectology studies what ordinary, non-linguist speakers believe about language variation: where they think different dialects are spoken, what those dialects sound like, and how correct, pleasant, or different they judge them to be. Developed in its modern form by Dennis R. Preston in the 1980s, it is a branch of folk linguistics that treats lay perceptions as data in their own right rather than as errors to be corrected. Through draw-a-map tasks, dialect ranking, and identification exercises, it reveals the mental maps and social evaluations that shape how people experience the linguistic landscape around them.	Variationist sociolinguistics is the quantitative study of how linguistic variation is structured by social and linguistic factors. Pioneered by William Labov in the 1960s and 1970s, it treats alternative ways of saying the same thing — the 'linguistic variable' — as systematically conditioned by speaker characteristics (class, age, sex, ethnicity), stylistic context, and the surrounding linguistic environment, and it uses statistical modeling of natural speech to reveal the orderly heterogeneity beneath apparent randomness.