Methods in Dialectology is a venerable institution, having started in 1972 in London, Western Ontario, Canada. This book is a collection of papers presented at Methods XVI in Tachikawa, Japan, in 2017. It was the first time Methods took place in Asia. In this volume, the emphasis is on diverse methods and diverse research questions. Many of the papers focus on language innovation, language change, corpus studies and linguistic atlas from different perspectives. At the same time, methodological innovation is very much in focus. Its emphasis meant that several papers showcased cutting-edge quantitative techniques that allow dialectologists to address questions that had been thought impossible to answer only a few years ago.

Yoshiyuki Asahi is an associate professor of sociolinguistics at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics. He holds a PhD in Japanese linguistics from Osaka University. He works on language variation and change through dialect contact and published several books on these topics.