What do you do with a linguistic variable once you’ve found one?

This chapter will provide a step-by-step procedure for setting up an analysis of a linguistic variable. It will detail the procedures for coding, how to illustrate the linguistic variable and how to test claims about one variant over another.

This chapter will cover new techniques beyond probing empirical data for data exploration. It will show you how to use a conditional inference tree (ctree) and random forest (cforest) to understand complex data interactions, pinpoint difficulties in research design, and discover data anomalies.The focus will be on techniques for resolving data and linguistic problems in preparation for statistical modelling

This chapter focuses on statistical modelling and asks, first, why we should use statistical modelling of linguistic variables. It will cover the terms ‘factor weight’, ‘p-value’, ‘coefficient’, ‘sum coding’, ‘treatment coding’ and describe what they mean.

This chapter will provide a step-by-step procedure for setting up an analysis of a linguistic variable. It will detail the procedures for coding, how to illustrate the linguistic variable, and how to test claims about one variant over another.

How do you collect data? This chapter will outline tried-and-true data collection techniques for conducting fieldwork in the speech community.

What does it all mean?

This chapter will discuss the relevant results for interpreting distributional (empirical) results and statistical modelling. What explains the linguistic variation in your data? What it all boils down to is ‘finding the story’, your interpretation.

In this chapter, we look at sociolinguistic aspects of globalization. The sociolinguistic turn entailed a focus on variation, which became more intricate as social barriers shifted. Recent changes have intensified such trends, and today language variation is no longer seen as static, in a socially stratified and rather rigid system. Rather, it represents a negotiated system and a fluid form of identity construction characterized by ever-widening social networks in an increasingly digital world. We look at superdiversity in the postmodern world and effects of mobility on sociolinguistic repertoires, present theoretical and methodological issues, both geopolitically and geoculturally, and introduce the World Language System, which orders the world’s languages into different layers according to criteria such as usage, function and speaker numbers. Finally, we look at winners and losers of language and globalization (countries, companies and individuals) so as to assess general sociolinguistic trends in a postmodern world.

We will look at attitudes and value judgments which speakers and communities have about English dialects and discuss their social relevance of language in general. We will see that language is not only a means to share information but an essential part of social life which helps us organize ourselves and define our identity. There are different levels of usage (regional, social, ethnic, individual) and that variation has regional, social and individual dimensions. We start with a short discussion of general attitudes about language varieties, look at social prejudice based on language usage, find out why some varieties are stigmatized whereas others have high prestige and get a first glance of perceptions about standard and non-standardized varieties. Looking at examples from English around the world, we take a look at perceptual dialectology to demonstrate how views toward dialects affect our ives – not forgetting their negative side effects.