Recordings of natural speech play a central role in the diverse subdisciplines of linguistics. The reliance on speech recordings is especially profound in sociolinguistics, where scholars have developed a range of techniques for eliciting and analyzing natural speech. However, sociolinguists have rarely focused explicitly on the storage, management, and preservation of their data – the interfac...

This work is a case study of applying nonparametric statistical methods to corpus data. We show how to use ideas from permutation testing to answer linguistic questions related to morphological productivity and type richness. In particular, we study the use of the suffixes -ity and -ness in the 17-century part of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence within the framework of historical soci...

The study of second language acquisition involves understanding what bilinguals know about their second language and how they acquire and use it. Because acquisition and use occur in a social context, it is important for secondlanguage acquisition researchers to understand the ways in which social context and the acquisition and use of a second language are related. In recent years, our underst...

This study investigates phonological variation and change in two varieties of standard Dutch: southern standard Dutch (spoken in Flanders, the northern part of Belgium) and northern standard Dutch (spoken in the Netherlands). A new source for studying language change in progress is introduced: archived recordings of radio broadcasts. The study covers the period from 1935 to 1993. Changes in pro...

1. Introduction Many areas connected with sociolinguistics in which quantitative data play a role, have seen the application of statistical methods, both traditional (experimental design, sampling, estimation, hypothesis testing) and heuristic (clustering, scaling). Some of these are discussed in other entries (see Social Psychology; Sociometry; Attitude Surveys: Question and Answer Process; Sc...

The variationist sociolinguistics model assumes that the human language faculty accommodates and generates language variation, and that the workings of grammar may have a quantitative and non-categorical component. By means of the linguistic variable, one describes and analyzes orderly heterogeneity in language use. The linguistic variable as a structural unit depends on the model of syntax one...

In recent years, a major growth area in applied natural language processing has been the application of automated techniques to massive datasets in order to answer questions about society, and by extension people. Sociolinguistics, which combines anthropology, statistics and linguistics (e.g. Labov 1994, 2001), studies linguistic data in order to answer key questions about the relationship of l...