The concept of "dialect" in the east slavic dialectological tradition and in western european languages

The dialectological theoretical-descriptive apparatus and the concept of "dialect" itself is not uniform across European linguistics / dialectology. This is particularly evident in the study of Ukrainian, and, more generally, in Russian and Belarusian dialectal tradition and terminology. If the term "dialect" already implies a series of debatable issues in western European dialectal tradition, i.e. English, German, French, Italian etc., its definition is even more complex in Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian. In these languages, in fact, it functions as a kind of hyperonym to which minor dialectal units are hierarchically subordinated. Many of these conceptual units remain misleading for the majority of readers approaching Ukrainian dialectology for the first time. For this reason, in this article, I will compare the essential terminological apparatus of Ukrainian and, to a lesser extent, of Russian and Belarusian dialectology with the English and other western European dialectal traditions with the aim of providing a useful working framework for the average European student of dialectology.