Language Variation

Abstract

This chapter introduces some of the range of variationist studies, including examples from recent research, and describes interactions with other linguistic fields. It highlights some of the community outreach that variationists perform as a result of their scholarship. It is organized around the following themes: the range of language variation, divisions of language variation, the locus of language variation, constraints on language variation, quantitative analysis, and then the linguistic systems where language variation is frequently studied, including the lexicon, morphology, syntax, phonology, and phonetics. Qualities of variationist sociolinguistics are exemplified with modern studies. All quantitative analysis provides inherent satisfaction to language variation researchers. It yields order, and in the scientific quest to explain human language, it presents ordered categories. However, variationists must move beyond the climatic feel of well-ordered quantitative results and resist the temptation to let them be the end of the research.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.