Many scholars anticipate that online interaction will have a long-term effect on the evolution of language, but little linguistic research yet addresses this question directly. In sociolinguistics, social network relations are recognized as the principal vehicle of language change. In this paper, I develop a social network approach to online language variation and change through qualitative and...

This paper presents an innovative socio-phonological analysis of dialect variation and change. The analysis uses sociolinguistic data regarding the diphthongs //, // and // in Mersea Island English, a variety of British English. The trajectory of change shown by the data, as well as certain aspects of contextual variation (namely Canadian Raising) will provide the basis for outlining a th...

The study of second language acquisition involves understanding what bilinguals know about their second language and how they acquire and use it. Because acquisition and use occur in a social context, it is important for secondlanguage acquisition researchers to understand the ways in which social context and the acquisition and use of a second language are related. In recent years, our underst...

For large language continua, such as Gbe of West Africa, a major challenge stakeholders concerned with language planning issues are facing is the question of the extensibility of written materials. To adequately inform language development program decisions in terms of literature extensibility, ideally, indepth sociolinguistic studies would be conducted in all of the varieties involved, an unde...

This chapter will shift the focus of attention away from the problems of understanding linguistic change that have occupied the discussion so far in order to examine the opposite situation: stable linguistic variation. The first step in a considered study of linguistic change is not the examination of change, but rather an investigation of the sociolinguistic patterns in the particular speech c...

this paper critically reviews studies that have interpretively invoked communication accommodation theory (cat) for the study of patient-provider interaction. cat’s sociolinguistic strategies—approximation, interpretability, interpersonal control, discourse management, and emotional expression—are succinctly introduced and their use in studies of patient-provider interaction discussed. the majo...

In this article, we address the problem of age identification of Twitter users, after their online text. We used a set of text mining, sociolinguistic-based and content-related text features, and we evaluated a number of well-known and widely used machine learning algorithms for classification, in order to examine their appropriateness on this task. The experimental results showed that Random F...

A central probletn in considering the subjects of sociolinguistics and dialectology has to do with the relationship between these two topics, which has often been somewhat dlflcult and controversial. Is, for example, dialectologj part of sociolinguistics, or is it a separate discipline? Once their relative status and complementar): nature have been discussed, the ultimate goal of this article i...