This book is a revised version of my Habilitation thesis, which I submitted to the University of Freiburg in 2011. Partial summaries of the research discussed in this book have appeared, or are appearing, as Szmrecsanyi (2008, 2011, forthcoming) and Szmrecsanyi and Wolk (2011). Generous support, intellectual and material, by the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS) is gratefully acknowledged.

For assistance in writing this book, I owe gratitude to many individuals, including the following: Bernd Kortmann, for discussion, feedback, and support; Peter Auer, Bernd Kortmann, and Christian Mair, who acted as official reviewers of my Habilitation thesis and provided me with eminently helpful and constructive reports; Hans Goebl, for inviting me to Salzburg in 2009 and teaching me Salzburg dialectometry, and for invaluable, open-minded comments and feedback before, during, and after this visit; Bernhard Castellazzi, Hans Goebl, and Pavel Smecka, for creating a number of Salzburg-style dialectometry maps (Maps C.3-C.6 and C.11- C.12); Jack Grieve, for calculating the global spatial autocorrelation (Moran's I) scores reported in Chapter 3; Wilbert Heeringa, for a number of excellent comments and suggestions, and for providing me with a convenient software tool to conduct the Mantel test; Paul Kerswill, for discussing some morphosyntactically ill-behaved dialects with me; Peter Kleiweg, for creating and maintaining the RuG/L04 dialectometry software (without which this book would be a lot less colorful); Merja Kytö, the series editor, and two anonymous referees for encouraging and constructive feedback; John Nerbonne, Wilbert Heeringa, and Bart Alewijnse, for having me over in Groningen in 2007 and explaining Groningen dialectometry to me; Sigrid Saou, for a close reading, many helpful comments, and good questions; and Christoph Wolk, for help with some of the statistics in this book.