Along with its focus on foundational research, one of the enduring concerns variationist sociolinguistics over past half-century has been a tradition application and engagement. As research paradigms have developed in variation studies, so traditions engagement issues social educational language equality. In formative era field, primary concern was which sociolinguists took strong, united stanc...

Quantitative approaches in the study of language variation have been strongly influenced by the sociolinguistic methodologies established by Labov's (1966 [1982]) study of the speech community of New York's Lower East Side. The sociolinguistic variables that have been pursued and studied in subsequent work have often used the non-linguistic variables that Labov investigated as their primary foc...

“Structured heterogeneity”, a founding concept of variationist sociolinguistics, puts focus on the ordered social differentiation in language. We extend notion structured heterogeneity to formal phonological structure, i.e., representations based contrasts, with implications for phonetic implementation. Phonology establishes parameters what varies and how. Patterns stability variability respect...

Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article we present a survey of the emerging field of ”computational sociolinguistics" that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive overview of CL r...

In the 2001 volume entitled The Sociolinguistics of Sign Languages, edited by Ceil Lucas (Cambridge University Press), it is stated that, since the early 1980s, “the field of sign language sociolinguistics has virtually exploded. There is work to report on from all of the major areas of sociolinguistics: multilingualism, bilingualism and language contact, variation, discourse analysis, language...

Sociophonetics integrates principles, techniques, and theoretical frameworks from phonetics with those from sociolinguistics. Early work under this label typically involved applications of standard phonetic methods – vowel formant analysis, for example – to ‘sociolinguistic’ data, such as socially-differentiated corpora of speech, or to non-standard dialects of widely-spoken languages. In that ...

This paper demonstrates the need for a uniform model of discourse variation analysis which is equipped to capture the complex nature of discourse variation and change whilst also ensuring generalizability. A review of the literature shows that the current heterogeneity in corpus construction, data quantification and theorizing of discourse variables impedes reliability and intersubjectivity. Su...