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Chapter 10: Language Variation and Change

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  • Page ID
    192709

    • Catherine Anderson, Bronwyn Bjorkman, Derek Denis, Julianne Doner, Margaret Grant, Nathan Sanders, and Ai Taniguchi
    • eCampusOntario
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    Learning Objectives

    When you’ve completed this chapter, you’ll be able to

    • Explain the difference between cross-linguistic and sociolinguistic variation.
    • Define important concepts in sociolinguistics.
    • Recognize linguistic variables in language data.
    • Discuss some of the major findings of variationist sociolinguistics.
    • Interpret basic patterns of quantitative sociolinguistic data from graphs.

    This chapter explores sociolinguistic variation and how it has been analyzed. We’ll be introduced to the concept of the linguistic variation, we’ll see how to analyze data from a variationist sociolinguistic perspective, and we’ll survey some of the major social factors that correlate with sociolinguistic variation.

    This page titled Chapter 10: Language Variation and Change is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Catherine Anderson, Bronwyn Bjorkman, Derek Denis, Julianne Doner, Margaret Grant, Nathan Sanders, and Ai Taniguchi (eCampusOntario) via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform; a detailed edit history is available upon request.