Sociolinguistic Variation in Athenian Suburban Speech

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...

Acquisition of Sociolinguistic Variation: Acoustic Characteristics of s-lenition in the Speech of Spanish-speaking Children

S-lenition is wide-spread in many dialects of Spanish, including Spanish spoken in the Caribbean region, coastal Mexico, Central America (but not in Costa Rica and Guatemala), and the Pacific coast of Colombia, Ecuador, coastal Peru, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, and much of Argentina (Lipski, 1994). Spanish s-lenition is a phonological process that weakens both morphological /-s/ (plural marker /-...

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...

Situation: Stylistic Variation in Sociolinguistic Corpora and Theory

Deciding what to code for in archived online corpora from sociolinguistic recordings is important, but enriching such recordings to include more variable situations is an important prerequisite if these corpora are to serve as a resource for the analysis of situational or stylistic variation, still a neglected variable in sociolinguistic theory and analysis. Accordingly, much of this paper is d...