Sociolinguistic variation and the public interest

Style and Sociolinguistic Variation

Ethnicity and Sociolinguistic Variation in San Francisco

California’s San Francisco Bay Area has long been one of the most ethnically diverse areas of the United States, and ethnicity is an integral aspect of any research on language use in the region. This article gives a brief social history of San Francisco with respect to settlement patterns since the 1850s’ gold rush, paying particular attention to Chinese Americans, who are argued to play an es...

Men's identities and sociolinguistic variation: The case of fraternity men

The variation patterns of the variable (ING) in an American college fraternity are explained by analyzing individual men's contextualized discourse. While most of the fraternity men predictably use a lower rate of the `vernacular' variant in weekly meetings, several men use a higher rate. I argue that all of the men index alignment roles associated with power, but that these alignment roles are...

The acquisition of sociolinguistic variation: looking back and thinking ahead

Although developmental sociolinguistics is a relatively under-researched field, several studies have described children’s use of sociolinguistic variables and some have suggested theoretical accounts for the learning mechanisms underpinning their acquisition. Taking a historical point of view, this paper aims firstly to provide an exhaustive review of the studies focused on phonological variabl...

What do Listeners Know about Sociolinguistic Variation?

A pair of experiments addressed two questions regarding listeners’ sociolinguistic knowledge: First, how do listeners use facts about speech to inform their beliefs about speakers? Second, and conversely, how might listeners use facts about speakers to inform their perceptions of speech? Results of Experiment 1 demonstrate that listeners can infer characteristics of speakers from their use of a...