Abstract
<jats:p>This book aims to shed light on the dialect landscape of the Bulgarian language, make a contribution to Bulgarian linguistic geography and enable the establishment of areal linguistics as a subfield of Bulgarian Studies. To achieve these goals, I use the map of the Bulgarian dialect terms for ‘tomato’ as a test range, in which I experiment with different approaches, in order to gauge the maximum depth of interpretation of areal data one can achieve and bring forth the research questions that experience and intuition suggest to a seasoned geolinguist at different stages of the analysis, questions which usually remain outside readers’ horizon.The book consists of an introduction, five chapters and a conclusion, and includes 124 maps, 41 figures and 25 tables. The text has been divided in numbered sections with numbers x .y in which x identifies the chapter and y stands for the consecutive number of the respective section within the chapter. I refer to these section numbers throughout the book and in this summary. With the exception of the words Sofia, Rhodope, Danube, Black Sea, Moesia and Bulgaria rendered in their usual English forms, the geographic and personal names in the summary are transliterated according to the 1968 version of standard 9 of the International Organization of Standardization, recommended for academic purposes.</jats:p>