The Sociolinguistic Variable

In the previous chapter, we began to move into the approach to the study of language in its social context that we call ‘sociolinguistic variation and change’. We looked at the division of languages into dialects on the basis of regional differences in choices that speakers make in different areas of language: phonetic, lexical, grammatical. Some of these differences are qualitative (all or nothing) but we also saw that many differences between regions are quantitative (more vs less), requiring us to begin to consider statistical methods.