Sociolinguistics

Within variationist sociolinguistics, statistical analysis is central to identifying patterns in language usage. Traditional analysis methods have persisted in research for approximately 40 years, even while major advances in statistical methods outside sociolinguistics are common practice. This chapter provides a discussion of appropriate statistical methods and an up‐to‐date presentation of current practices in the field. As such, by describing thoroughly the history and traditional methods of analysis used in sociolinguistics, we also hope to shed light on newer methods of statistical analysis. We begin with a description of the history of variationist sociolinguistics, focusing on seminal work by William Labov, Henrietta Cedergren, and David Sankoff. Next, a more contemporary approach to quantitative analyses is presented including mixed‐effects models, conditional inference trees, and random forests. We conclude the chapter with some remarks about recent interdisciplinary developments connecting sociolinguistic analysis with corpus and computational linguistics as a desirable future direction for the field.

Applied linguistics · Computational linguistics · Inference · Presentation (obstetrics) · Sociolinguistics · Statistical analysis · Statistical inference · Statistical model

• Research methods in Sociolinguistics

  Open Access•Juan Manuel Hernández Campoy•AILA Review•2014

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