Dimensions of linguistic variation

This book investigates evidence for the myriad factors which influence language variation and change, and considers how to best account for these factors in data collection and metadata coding. Given linguists’ increasing ability to preserve and share data, questions arise around the possibility of comparing data from different communities: how should a corpus builder model, elicit, encode, analyze, and archive data, which has been collected from highly diverse groups of language users, from situations beyond the sociolinguistic interview, in a way that supports reuse, comparison across collections, and longer-term archiving? Answering these questions requires a highly nuanced understanding of the social influences on linguistic variation. Differences between communities and contexts can permit or encourage comparisons, in some cases, but may render comparisons impossible in other cases. The current volume builds on a rich foundation of insight from the sociolinguistics community as to how community-specific distinctions shape variation and change within a given community, to present new, state-of-the-art insights from a diverse range of community and context types. Our hope is that this volume will enable researchers both to expand the established set of variables expected to be considered in any community study, and to categorize data and results in ways that best permit cross-community comparisons.