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.

This chapter details how data are gathered, analyzed, and debated in a way which distinguishes citizen sociolinguistics from typical social science methodology, exemplifying and discussing several distinctions: The tools used to gather data are often misuses of other data tools like dialect surveys, language quizzes, or Google Translate; objective “accuracy” is less important than “likes” or popularity; sharing data is commonplace and necessary, given the importance of popularity for validity; transcripts are not kept in a locked drawer, but openly circulated; transcription of talk (often using phonetic spelling, emojis, or creative punctuation) is not “accurate” or “inaccurate” but is a form of interpretation in itself; making friends with research participants is not creepy overstepping but the essence of citizen sociolinguistic inquiry and a serendipitous way in which findings are disseminated. Validity, then, is built through participation in this community, rather than appeal to another knowledge base (such as published academic research). This chapter concludes with a short guide for fostering and exploring everyday conversations about language, whether fomented by curiosity and wonderment or critique and arrest.