This volume is the first full-fledged handbook of Japanese dialects in English. The study of Japanese dialects has a long tradition, and significant contributions have been made in many subfields of linguistics such as geolinguistics, sociolinguistics, philology, phonology, accentology, grammar, and lexicology. While Japanese dialectology is heavily influenced by the Western developments in the field, some original domestic achievements have also been made based on the meticulous fieldwork, the compilation of dialect dictionaries, and the painstaking mapping of dialect features in a large...