Research Methods in Sociolinguistics

Janet Holmes holds a personal Chair in Linguistics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Her sociolinguistics teaching focuses on workplace discourse, New Zealand English, and language and gender. She is Director of the Wellington Language in the Workplace (LWP) project and a Fellow of the Royal Society of New Zealand. Her many publications include The Handbook of Language and Gender (edited with M. Meyerhoff, Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), Leadership, Discourse and Ethnicity (with M. Marra and B. Vine, 2011), and An Introduction to Sociolinguistics, Fourth Edition (2013).Kirk Hazen is Professor of Linguistics and director of the West Virginia Dialect Project at West Virginia University. He is the author of Dialect Change and Maintenance on the Outer Banks (with W. Wolfram and N. Schilling-Estes, 1998), Identity and Ethnicity in the Rural South: A Sociolinguistic View through Past and Present Be (2000), and An Introduction to Language (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014).

“This book is an invaluable aid for student researchers eager to produce high-quality, impactful sociolinguistic research. The editors of this volume have met their goal of providing the student with the theoretical framework, historical background, and methodological tools required to execute an array of different research endeavors within the field.”  (LINGUIST List, 8 December 2014)

• Notes on Contributors viiAcknowledgments xiiSymbols for Vowels Used in This Volume xiiiArticulatory Position of Vowels Used in This Volume xivIntroduction 1Janet Holmes and Kirk Hazen1 A Historical Assessment of Research Questions in Sociolinguistics 7Kirk HazenPart I Types of Data and Methods of Data Collection 232 Sociolinguistic Interviews 25Michol Hoffman3 Written Surveys and Questionnaires in Sociolinguistics 42Erik Schleef4 Experimental Methods in Sociolinguistics 58Katie Drager5 Computer-mediated Communication and Linguistic Landscapes 74Jannis AndroutsopoulosPart II Methods of Analysis 91Focusing on Features of Language from a Sociolinguistic Perspective 926 Sociohistorical Analysis 93Terttu Nevalainen7 Corpus Linguistics in Sociolinguistics 107Paul Baker8 Phonetic Analysis in Sociolinguistics 119Erik R. Thomas9 Phonological Considerations in Sociophonetics 136Paul Kerswill and Kevin Watson10 Morphosyntactic Analysis in Sociolinguistics 149Julia Davydova11 Vocabulary Analysis in Sociolinguistic Research 163Michael Adams12 Doing Discourse Analysis in Sociolinguistics 177Janet Holmes13 Words and Numbers: Statistical Analysis in Sociolinguistics 194Gregory R. GuyFocusing on Aspects of Sociocultural Context in Analyzing Language 21114 Anthropological Analysis in Sociolinguistics 213Alexandra Jaffe15 Conversation Analysis in Sociolinguistics 230Paul Drew16 Geographical Dialectology 246David Britain17 Speech Communities, Social Networks, and Communities of Practice 262Robin Dodsworth18 Analyzing Sociolinguistic Variation in Multilingual Contexts 276Rajend Mesthrie19 Social Context, Style, and Identity in Sociolinguistics 290Nikolas Coupland20 Researching Children's Acquisition of Sociolinguistic Competence 304Carmel O'ShannessyIndex 325