Abstract Variationist sociolinguists have now collectively spent decades gathering vernacular language data, enriching linguistic theory through detailed empirical analysis. What the field is yet to offer are reflective accounts of how partnership with communities and participatory research models can begin decolonise field. In this paper we reflect on Indigenous‐led fieldwork that allowed us d...

Abstract This paper engages with the notion of shibboleth, an indexically loaded, usually referentially indifferent set (ideologically constructed) minimal pairs that is used in order to mark and perform social differentiation. We argue shibboleth be considered interpretive (metapragmatic) phenomenon operates on different sociolinguistic scales, notably discursive scale (ideologies communicatio...

Being Trilingual is no longer a strange phenomenon as it may have been sometime back. In fact, in urban settings Kenya, children are learning English third language (L3) rather than second (L2). Canale and Swain (1980) propose that communicative competence comprises four competencies, namely: Linguistic, Sociolinguistic, Strategic, Discourse competencies Of concern this study the sociolinguisti...

We present a methodology based on topic modeling that can be used to identify and quantify sociolinguistic differences between groups of people, and describe a regression method that can disentangle the influences of different attributes of the people in the group (e.g., culture, gender, age). As an example, we explore the concept of personal values, and present a cross-cultural analysis of val...

Linguistic geography and sociolinguistics have been widely employed among dialectologists in postwar Japan. Over the last ten years, computer-processing of field survey data has become more and more common. The author originally developed the GLAPS processor to produce linguistic atlases by computer. GLAPS has since been modified to ,produce glottograms and crosstables and to handle sociolingui...