There are some institutions which offer advanced undergraduate and postgraduate modules in dialectology/ regional variation, and this could be a set text for such modules. It would be an important resource for students undertaking dissertations/ theses in this area, and would therefore have a library market. I am happy with the overall balance and scope of the book. The main strength of the project is its timeliness. There is a new interest in regional variation, as witnessed by the huge public response to the BBC Voices project, and a number of dialectologists/ sociolinguists are applying insights from human geography to dialect studies in new ways. 'I am very enthusiastic about this. An up-to-date volume on dialectology is long overdue. I would certainly recommend it to students as secondary reading for Sociolinguistics, and for my modules on Late Modern English and Dialect in Literature and Song, both of which involve discussion of 19th - century dialectology. If I were to offer a module on dialectology at third-year undergraduate or masters level, I would recommend this as a set text'. - Professor Joan Beal, University of Sheffield, UK