The new series Linguistik Impulse & Tendenzen is intended to be an attractive forum for high-quality studies in German linguistics. The series aims to include and reflect current trends while providing groundbreaking impetus for the subject and its further development. The focus of the series is on synchronic linguistics and all of its facets. The series also includes works from pragmatics, computer linguistics and grammatical theory, as well as from sociolinguistics, research in technical language, and text linguistics. Innovation, transdisciplinarity and qualitative excellence are the guidelines for the series. It is open to monographs as well as to systematically conceptualized anthologies and conference proceedings. The languages of publication are German and English.

The dimensions of time and space fundamentally cause and shape the variability of all human language. To reduce investigation of this insight to manageable proportions, researchers have traditionally concentrated on the "deepest" dialects. But it is increasingly apparent that, although most people still speak with a distinct regional coloring, the new mobility of speakers in recently industrialized and postindustrial societies and the efflorescence of communication technologies cannot be ignored. This has given rise to a reconsideration of the relationship between geographical place and cultural space, and the fundamental link between language and a spatially bounded territory. Language and Space: An International Handbook of Linguistic Variation seeks to take full account of these developments in a comprehensive, theoretically rich way. The introductory volume examines the concept of space and linguistic approaches to it, the structure and dynamics of language spaces, and relevant research methods. A second volume offers the first thorough exploration of the interplay between linguistic investigation and cartography, and subsequent volumes uniformly document the state of research into the spatial dimension of particular language groupings.