Introduction

Dialect Classifications of Languages in Europe (DIACLEU) aims to publish a complete, state-of-the-art and historical overview of dialect classifications of the endogenous languages spoken in Europe. The volume collects all the classifications published until now for these languages and makes them accessible for an international audience.

The structure of DIACLEU and the organization of the classifications per language facilitates comparison between (groups of) languages. Each individual chapter provides a full overview of the dialect classifications of a particular language, taking into account published studies.

Europe is the cradle of dialectology and the study of geographical language variation has an almost century long tradition in most European countries. In fact, regional variation and the dialects of all national and most of the endogenous minority languages spoken in Europe have been the topic of scientific research. Classifications of dialects and dialects groups has been produced for each of these languages. Nevertheless, there is no publication that collects and analyses the dialect classifications in the European languages. DIACLEU proposes to fill the existing gap by gathering and analysing the dialect classifications made so far in the European languages.