The chapter ’The Feline Territory of Language’ shows us how we can approach online language variation with dialectology and outlines the steps to take for a dialectological description of a regional language variety, ranging from dialect data collection to dictionary-making. Using cat-related headwords and survey questions as examples, we look at how the data is collected and presented in the Survey of English Dialects and the Survey of Anglo-Welsh Dialects. The chapter then moves on to dialect lexicography, with cats illustrating the approaches of the EDD, the OED, and the Urban Dictionary, leading us into online dialectology and its use of computers to collect, analyse, and display the data. The last section of the chapter covers phonetics, including its acoustic and articulatory branches. Instead of the usually studied human sounds, however, it takes cat vocalisations to illustrate what to do in phonetics.

The observation and measurement of the movement of the organs of the vocal tract during speech is relevant for the understanding of phonetic phenomena, from descriptions of under-documented languages and cross-linguistic comparison of speech sound production, to investigations of factors impacting speech motor planning, and to testing models of the relationship between the vocal tract and acoustics. This chapter describes the most commonly used methods for measuring or recording the position and movements of the organs that make up the vocal tract during speech. Techniques discussed in this chapter include direct vocal tract imaging (e.g. magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), laryngoscopy, ultrasound imaging), articulatory point tracking (e.g. X-ray microbeam tracking (XRMB), electromagnetic articulography (EMA), Velotrace), and indirect measures of articulator movement (e.g. electroglottography (EGG), airflow and air pressure measures, static palatography and electropalatography (EPG)). These methods vary in a number of respects. This chapter discusses advantages and drawbacks of each method described, as well as factors relevant to researchers during the planning stages of a study.

Chapter 2 provides an overview of phonetics, the study of human speech sounds. It examines two main approaches: articulatory phonetics, which shows how humans produce the sounds of language, and acoustic phonetics, which explains the physical properties of speech sounds. The chapter explains how speech is produced by modifying the shape of the vocal tract and how the articulators interact. We learn why the International Phonetic Alphabet is necessary to study world languages, and ample practice in using the IPA is provided. Practice goes hand in hand with a detailed categorization and description of speech sounds, both consonants and vowels, summarized in charts and figures. The chapter also examines speech processes which lead to changes in the quality of a sound due to the linguistic context. Descriptions and examples of processes such as assimilation, palatalization, nasalization, dissimilation, epenthesis, and deletion, are included in this section. The final part of the chapter introduces readers to acoustic properties of speech sounds by focusing on spectrograms and how to interpret them.