An analysis of six characters from a Chinese television drama reveals socially meaningful patterns of variation in rhythm and final lengthening. Two measures of rhythm, the syllabic PVI and Varco∆S, reveal the three female characters to be more “stress-timed” than the three male characters; smoothing splines analysis, meanwhile, shows that the women do more lengthening of utterance-final syllab...

This study aimed at providing a brief overview of ISIS’s ideology and origins as starting points for an analysis its propaganda strategy. How did ISIS utilize ideological wing to achieve socio-educational goals? An intrinsic case is used provide key multi-lingual documents media modes. It these modes that uses primary sources strategy, which employed through vocabulary reinforcement, in additio...

Quantitative approaches in the study of language variation have been strongly influenced by the sociolinguistic methodologies established by Labov's (1966 [1982]) study of the speech community of New York's Lower East Side. The sociolinguistic variables that have been pursued and studied in subsequent work have often used the non-linguistic variables that Labov investigated as their primary foc...

In every society there are things which are believed to be not appropriate if spoken on public occasions. A large number of words are therefore taken as silly, vulgar or obscene when used in communication. These words are “taboos”. This paper investigates all the major varieties of English taboo, i.e., bodily excretions, death and disease, sex, four-letter words, privacy and discriminatory lang...

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...

The four papers in this issue of the journal are jointly focused on two distinct themes: sociophonetics—the study of speakers and listeners’ sensitivity to the social context in which language is produced and perceived—and exemplar theory, as a way of explaining this behavior. In these comments, I will try to relate the findings in the first area to the field of sociolinguistics, and then relat...