Delimiting the Sydney Speech Community Author(s):

Quantitative analyses of large data sets make use of both linguistic and sociological categories in sociolinguistic studies. While the linguistic categories are generally well-defined and there are sufficient tokens for further definition based on mathematical manipulation, the social characteristics such as socioeconomic class or ethnicity are neither. The familiar problem of grouping speakers by such sociological characteristics prior to quantitative analysis is addressed and an alternative solution principal components analysis is suggested. Principal components analysis is used here as a heuristic for grouping speakers solely on the basis of linguistic behaviour; the groups thus defined can then be described according to sociological characteristics. In addition, by naming the principal components, the major linguistic and social dimensions of the variation in the data can be identified. Principal components analysis was applied to vowel variation data collected as part of a sociolinguistic survey of English in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. (Sociolinguistics, variation studies, quantitative methods in linguistics, dialectology, Australian English, role of migrants in language change) In The social stratification of English in New York City, Labov contrasted two approaches to the study of social variation in language (i966:209-I I). The first approach, which we will call social grouping, assigns speakers to analytically defined social groups according to demographic or sociological criteria and uses group membership (or any of its defining criteria) as an explanatory variable in the statistical analysis of linguistic behaviour; for example, by first averaging values of linguistic variables across the speakers in each group and then comparing averages across groups. In the second approach, which we will call linguistic grouping, the overall distribution of the linguistic variables is first determined ( 1987 Cambridge University Press 0047-4045/87 $5.00 + .00