The 'third wave' of variation study, spearheaded by the sociolinguist Penelope Eckert, places its focus on social meaning, or the inferences that can be drawn about speakers based on how they talk. While social meaning has always been a concern of modern sociolinguistics, its aims and assumptions have not been explicitly spelled out until now. This pioneering book provides a comprehensive overview of the central tenets of variation study, examining several components of dialects, and considering language use in a wide variety of cultural and linguistic contexts. Each chapter, written by a leader in the field, posits a unique theoretical claim about social meaning and presents new empirical data to shed light on the topic at hand. The volume makes a case for why attending to social meaning is vital to the study of variation while also providing a foundation from which variationists can productively engage with social meaning.

The papers in this volume celebrate the work of Angus McIntosh, who specialized in dialects of Later Middle English, and wrote on other topics in English linguistics as well. Of the papers in this volume most deal with English and a few with other subjects in (historical) dialectology.

The papers in this volume celebrate the work of Angus McIntosh, who specialized in dialects of Later Middle English, and wrote on other topics in English linguistics as well. Of the papers in this volume most deal with English and a few with other subjects in (historical) dialectology.

Traditional dialects have been encroached upon by the increasing mobility of their speakers and by the onslaught of national languages in education and mass media. Typically, older dialects are “leveling” to become more like national languages. This is regrettable when the last articulate traces of a culture are lost, but it also promotes a complex dynamics of interaction as speakers shift from dialect to standard and to intermediate compromises between the two in their forms of speech. Varieties of speech thus live on in modern communities, where they still function to mark provenance, but increasingly cultural and social provenance as opposed to pure geography. They arise at times from the need to function throughout the different groups in society, but they also may have roots in immigrants’ speech, and just as certainly from the ineluctable dynamics of groups wishing to express their identity to themselves and to the world. The future of dialects is a selection of the papers presented at Methods in Dialectology XV, held in Groningen, the Netherlands, 11-15 August 2014. While the focus is on methodology, the volume also includes specialized studies on varieties of Catalan, Breton, Croatian, (Belgian) Dutch, English (in the US, the UK and in Japan), German (including Swiss German), Italian (including Tyrolean Italian), Japanese, and Spanish as well as on heritage languages in Canada.

Linguistic Variation: Confronting Fact and Theory honors Shana Poplack in bringing together contributions from leading scholars in language variation and change. The book demonstrates how variationist methodology can be applied to the study of linguistic structures and processes. It introduces readers to variation theory, while also providing an overview of current debates on the linguistic, cognitive and sociocultural factors involved in linguistic patterning. With its coverage of a diverse range of language varieties and linguistic problems, this book offers new quantitative analyses of actual language production and processing from both top experts and emerging scholars, and presents students and practitioners with theoretical frameworks to meaningfully engage in accountable research practice.

This volume brings together research on panel studies with the aim of providing a coherent empirical and theoretical knowledge-base for examining the impact of maturation and lifespan-specific effects on linguistic malleability in the post-adolescent speaker. Building on the work of Wagner and Buchstaller (2018), the present collection offers a critical examination of the theoretical implications of panel research across a range of geographic regions and time periods. The volume seeks to offer a way forward in the debates circling about the phenomenon of later-life language change, drawing on contributions from a variety of linguistic disciplines to examine critical topics such as the effect of linguistic architecture, the roles of mobility and identity construction, and the impact of frequency effects. Taken together, this edited collection both informs and pushes forward key questions on the nature of lifespan change, making this key reading for students and researchers in cognitive linguistics, historical linguistics, dialectology, and variationist sociolinguistics.

Tying together work on a number of languages and linguistic varieties in different locales, this book provides students and researchers with a convenient, unified overview of variationist analysis in linguistics. Variation in Linguistic Systems takes a theoretical and quantitative approach to the study of variation in language, focusing on the role of language-internal constraints on variation and the relation of linguistic variation to linguistic theory. It introduces the basic concepts of variationist linguistics and includes key discussions on language change, language contact, the different types of variation, multivariate analysis with GoldVarb, and variation in sound and grammatical systems. Here is an ideal textbook for an introductory course on variation, as well as a useful resource for scholars with some background in linguistics who are interested in the study of language variation and its relation to the wider field of linguistics.

The Cambridge Handbook of English Corpus Linguistics (CHECL) surveys the breadth of corpus-based linguistic research on English, including chapters on collocations, phraseology, grammatical variation, historical change, and the description of registers and dialects. The most innovative aspects of the CHECL are its emphasis on critical discussion, its explicit evaluation of the state of the art in each sub-discipline, and the inclusion of empirical case studies. While each chapter includes a broad survey of previous research, the primary focus is on a detailed description of the most important corpus-based studies in this area, with discussion of what those studies found, and why they are important. Each chapter also includes a critical discussion of the corpus-based methods employed for research in this area, as well as an explicit summary of new findings and discoveries.

A book on those who know and use two or more languages: Who are they? How do they do it?

This volume corrects the relative neglect in Second Language Acquisition studies of the quantitative study of language variation and provides insights into such issues as language transfer, acquisition through exposure, language universals, learner's age and so forth. These studies bolster the idea that a full account of SLA development (and, hence, a “theory of SLA”) must be built on not only detailed accounts of interlanguage data but also on a wide appeal to factors which govern the psycholinguistic bases of SLA. An important addition to the volume is a comprehensive guide to both the DOS and Macintosh versions of the VARBRUL statistical program used by variationists.