Dimensions of Linguistic Variation

The chapters in this book all demonstrate that, while corpora from different communities can vary in different ways, those differences must and can be integrated into data coding and metadata coding in ways that permit the linguistic patterns of various communities to be compared.

List of contents

• 1 Introduction to the Volume


• Christopher Cieri, Lauren Hall-Lew, Malcah Yaeger-Dror, and Katie Drager




• 2 Section 1 Introduction: Research Planning and Interactions with Ethical, Legal, and Regulatory Issues


• Christopher Cieri


• 3 IRBs, Researchers, and Social Media as (Socio)linguistic Field Sites


• Alexandra D'Arcy




• 4 Conducting Linguistic Fieldwork with IRB Approval: A Suggested Approach


• Denise DiPersio




• 5 Section 2 Introduction: Introduction to Demographics and Attitudes


• Lauren Hall-Lew and Christopher Cieri




• 6 Sociolinguistics of Multicultural Societies: Implications for Data and Methodology


• Shobha Satyanath




• 7 Bilingual Coding


• Barbara E. Bullock, Almeida Jacqueline Toribio




• 8 Snapshots in Time: Coding Social Factors in Changing Communities


• Devyani Sharma, Nathan Young




• 9 Dialect Contact


• Yoshiyuki Asahi




• 10 Studying Ethnicity and Its Sociolinguistic Fluidities: Variationist Perspectives from English in South Africa


• Rajend Mesthrie


• 11 Reorienting Blackness and Whiteness in Studies of Sociolinguistic Variation


• Sonya Fix, Renée Blake, Cecelia Cutler, Nicole Holliday




• 12 Diversity and Dialect Contact in North American Latinx Communities


• Robert Bayley


• 13 Conceptualizing and Coding Social Class in Linguistic Corpora


• Joshua Hummel, Jordan Holley, Robin Dodsworth, Suzanne Evans Wagner


• 14 Social Class, Social Capital, Social Practice, and Language in British Sociolinguistics: Unravelling


• Historical and Ethnographic Complexities


• Anne Fabricius


• 15 What Can Macrosocial Categories Tell Us about Gender and Sexuality?


• Penelope Eckert


• 16 Understanding Age


• David Bowie


• 17 Religion and Religiosity


• David Bowie and Malcah Yaeger-Dror


• 18 Linguistic Variation and Political Identity


• Lauren Hall-Lew, Sarah van Eyndhoven




• 19 Language Attitudes and Language Change


• Nicolai Pharao


• 20 Measuring Attitudes


• Carmen Llamas, Dominic Watt




• 21 Levels of Linguistic Accommodation


• Dominic Watt, Carmen Llamas




• 22 Section 3 Introduction: Introduction to Social Situation


• Lauren Hall-Lew and Malcah Yaeger-Dror




• 23 What Kind of Data Is It? Situating Sociolinguistic Corpora in Context


• Sali A. Tagliamonte




• 24 Best Practice for the Study of Language Change in Real Time


• Frans Gregersen, Gert Foget Hansen




• 25 Coding Categories Relevant to Interaction


• Richard Ogden, Marina N. Cantarutti




• 26 Approaching Variation in Political Discourse


• Jennifer Sclafani




• 27 Self-Recordings and Oral Histories


• Sonia Barnes and Lauren Hall-Lew


• 28 Social Media as a Sociolinguistic Resource


• Jacob Eisenstein


• 29 Singing as a Dimension of Linguistic Variation: Considerations for a Corpus of Song


• Andy Gibson


• 30 Discussion: Balancing Representativity and Metadata in Sociolinguistic Corpora


• Tyler Kendall




• Index

About the author

Chris Cieri was a proud native Philadelphian with a lifelong affinity for his Italian heritage. His PhD examined phonological variation in L'Aquila, Italy. As LDC Executive Director from 1998-2023, he pursued his dual research interests in linguistics (variation, phonetics, phonology, morphology, dialectology) and language-related technologies (databases, annotation, computer-assisted analysis). As it evolved from a data repository and research hub to a prominent global data center, Chris developed the LDC's reputation for tackling complex research and developing high-quality resources. His goal was to provide tools for the development and dissemination of cross-linguistic data to be shared by sociolinguists around the world.

Lauren Hall-Lew is Professor and Personal Chair of Sociolinguistics at the University of Edinburgh. She specializes in phonetic variation and change, with particular interest in the analysis of socioindexical meaning and its potential role in language change

Katie Drager is Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Hawai'I at Manoa, specializing in sociophonetics and experimental sociolinguistics. Her research examines the link between linguistic forms and social meanings, especially how expectations about a talker can influence how listeners interpret the forms produced by that talker.

Malcah Yaeger-Dror has carried out research on language variation and change in Canadian French, American English, and Israeli Hebrew communities.

Summary

In Dimensions of Linguistic Variation, the contributors investigate evidence for the myriad factors which influence language variation and change, and consider how to best account for these factors in data and metadata coding. Given linguists' increasing ability to preserve and share data, questions arise around the possibility of comparing data from different communities: how should a corpus builder model, elicit, encode, analyze, and archive data that have been collected from highly diverse groups of speakers, from situations beyond the sociolinguistic interview, in a way that supports re-use, comparison across collections, and longer-term archiving?

Answering these questions requires a highly nuanced understanding of the social influences on speech variation. Social differences between communities and contexts can permit or encourage comparisons, in some cases, and render comparisons impossible, in others. The current volume builds on a rich foundation of insight from the sociolinguistics community as to how community-specific social distinctions shape variation and change within a given community and presents new, state-of-the-art insights from a diverse range of community and context types.

The editors have compiled a volume which will enable researchers both to expand the established set of variables expected to be considered in any community study, and to categorize data and results in ways that best permit cross-community comparisons. They present the issues involved in research planning, the modeling of the target community, subject selection, the elicitation and coding of demographic, situational and attitudinal factors, and how they all affect analysis and potential reuse.

Product details

• Authors: Christopher Hall-Lew Cieri, Yaeger Dror, Yaeger Dror
• Assisted by: Christopher Cieri (Editor), Katie Drager (Editor), Lauren Hall-Lew (Editor), Hall-Lew Lauren (Editor), Malcah Yaeger-Dror (Editor), Yaeger-Dror Malcah (Editor)
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 22.04.2025
• EAN: 9780197533505
• ISBN: 978-0-19-753350-5
• No. of pages: 592
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative linguistics; LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Syntax, LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / Morphology, Historical & comparative linguistics, Grammar, syntax and morphology, Historical and comparative linguistics, Grammar, syntax