Dialect Test
The Dialect Test was created by A.J. Ellis in February 1879, and was used in the fieldwork for his work "On Early English Pronunciation". It stands as one of the earliest methods of identifying vowel sounds and features of speech. The aim was to capture the main vowel sounds of an individual dialect by listening to the reading of a short passage. All the categories of West Saxon words and vowels were included in the test so that comparisons could be made with the historic West Saxon speech as well as with various other dialects.
Dialectology
The first comparative dialect study in Germany was "The Dialects of Bavaria" by Johann Andreas Schmeller, which included a linguistic atlas. In 1876, Georg Wenker sent postal questionnaires out over Northern Germany. These postal questionnaires contained a list of sentences written in Standard German. These sentences were then transcribed into the local dialect, reflecting dialectal differences. Many studies proceeded from this, and over the next century dialect studies were carried out all over the world. Joseph Wright produced the six-volume "English Dialect Dictionary" in 1905.
Traditional studies in Dialectology were generally aimed at producing dialect maps, whereby imaginary lines were drawn over a map to indicate different dialect areas. The move away from traditional methods of language study however caused linguists to become more concerned with social factors. Dialectologists therefore began to study social, as well as regional variation. The "Linguistic Atlas of the United States" (1930s) was amongst the first dialect studies to take social factors into account.