Along with game theory, the emerging science of networks has given us a framework for analyzing social systems plausible to both intuition and implementation. As an interaction structure in computer simulation models, social networks provide a way to envision phenomena like information spread, dialect formation, and language change in a more robust way. In this sense a multitude of sociolinguis...

This article has two central aims. Firstly, to discuss how a sociolinguistic approach to language learning creates measurable increases in performance and secondly to highlight the need for a greater quantity and quality of research in this area. The article begins with a discussion on the discontent that exists regarding studies which investigate how sociolinguistic variables influence the qua...

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 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...