(Im)politeness and Regional Variation

Abstract

Traditional dialectology has predominantly concentrated on regional variation within one country. Yet, since dialect areas do not necessarily coincide with political units and since dialects are not discrete subdivisions but, as a rule, form continua of mutually comprehensible varieties which may transgress nation-state boundaries, regions in neighbouring countries are occasionally also considered (Chambers & Trudgill, 1998: 3-12). For some pluricentric languages, there is an additional, but more recent tradition of investigating regional variation on a national level. Pluricentric languages are languages spoken natively in more than one nation-state (cf. Clyne, 1992). Examples include French (spoken in France,