Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-1275

Title: Dimensions of Linguistic Variation
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Oxford University Press
http://www.oup.com/us
Book URL: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/dimensions-of-linguistic-variation-9780197533499?utm_source=linguistlist&utm_medium=listserv&utm_campaign=linguistics

Editor(s): Christopher Cieri, Lauren Hall-Lew, Katie Drager, and Malcah Yaeger-Dror

Reviewer: Anna Ristilä and Selcen Erten-Johansson

SUMMARY

The book’s central concern is the relationship between linguistic variation and social factors. Linguistic behaviour can be observed directly through spoken, written, or signed signals, but social factors are captured indirectly as metadata about users and contexts. Since analysis is limited to what is recorded, the choice and level of detail in metadata are crucial. Thus, this volume aims to guide researchers in preparing new investigations, drawing attention to demographic, attitudinal, and situational factors associated with linguistic variation. It also problematizes social variables often treated as straightforward. A key theme throughout the book is the recognition that both social contexts and research practices are dynamic, which has implications not only for the study of individuals and communities but also for research design and ethics.

Section 1 highlights the role of ethics, law, and regulation in sociolinguistic research. In the section introduction (Chapter 2) Christopher Cieri stresses that all types of language data can be useful if collected with a clear understanding of the study population. The author warns that weak population models limit the ability to link language use to social factors. Cieri also distinguishes between what is legal and what is ethically acceptable, noting that following the law does not guarantee meeting scholarly standards. The author argues that ethics must be built into research design, since potential harm may not always be foreseen by Institutional Review Boards (IRBs).

Alexandra D’Arcy (Chapter 3) extends this discussion to social media research, questioning assumptions that publicly accessible online content is automatically exempt from ethical review. The author identifies three levels of ethics—procedural, substantive, and practical—and calls for researchers to think critically about how communities might feel about their data being used. Denise DiPersio (Chapter 4) adds a practical guide for preparing IRB-compliant research protocols, covering objectives, methods, consent, and confidentiality.

Section 2 turns to demographic coding, social attitudes, and frameworks for analyzing variation. In the section introduction (Chapter 5) Lauren Hall-Lew and Cieri discuss the difficulties of representing human populations, stressing the importance of context, relevance, and clear definitions. They also highlight the value of intersectionality and indexicality in linking language features to social categories. Shobha Satyanath (Chapter 6) applies these ideas to multicultural and non-Western contexts, drawing on cases from India, South Africa, Creole-speaking groups, and postcolonial English varieties, and emphasizes the complexity of speech communities.

Barbara Bullock and Almeida Toribio (Chapter 7) address bilingual speech, pointing out the challenges of analyzing data where languages interact on multiple levels. They recommend detailed metadata on proficiency, experience, and identity, and distinguish between visible phenomena (e.g., code-switching) and less obvious processes (e.g., calquing). Devyani Sharma and Nathan Young (Chapter 8) build on this by showing the need for combining external (etic) and community-based (emic) perspectives, and for transparent, shareable data.

Other chapters explore dialect contact, ethnicity, and sociolinguistic change. Yoshiyuki Asahi (Chapter 9) examines short-term and long-term accommodation, showing how social and linguistic variables interact. Rajend Mesthrie (Chapter 10) analyzes South African English, arguing that ethnicity, understood as community-based and performative, is a more useful concept than race. Sonya Fix, Renée Blake, Cecelia Cutler, and Nicole Holliday (Chapter 11) focus on racial and ethnic variation in New York City, using participant-driven approaches to capture complex identities. Robert Bayley (Chapter 12) extends the discussion to Latinx communities in North America, urging analysis that goes beyond simple English–Spanish contrasts.

Social class and gender are also given careful attention in the book. Joshua Hummel, Jordan Holley, Robin Dodsworth, and Suzanne Evans Wagner (Chapter 13) discuss how to code social class, weighing practicality against accuracy. Anne Fabricius (Chapter 14) reviews models of class used in British sociolinguistics and considers their relevance for other societies. Penelope Eckert (Chapter 15) critiques binary gender coding and advocates approaches that recognize intersectionality and social change.

Some variables are inherently very fluid and difficult to code. David Bowie (Chapter 16) shows how a variable as seemingly simple as “age” can be complex and sometimes even misleading. David Bowie and Malcah Yaeger-Dror (Chapter 17) talk about religion and religiosity, while Lauren Hall-Lew and Sarah van Eyndhoven (Chapter 18) introduce political identity as a variable; both religiosity and political identity are strongly about the presentation of self as well as evaluation of others, which can change over time.

Language attitudes are covered in two chapters. Nicolai Pharao (Chapter 19) focuses on the connection between language attitudes and language change. Pharao covers commonly used methods and discusses how the choice of methodology has implications for exposing overt and covert norms. Carmen Llamas and Dominic Watt (Chapter 20) focus on two direct methods of obtaining quantitative attitude data. They describe their two variations of a visual analogue scale and how they improve on some weak points of the regular version of the scale.

Dominic Watt and Carmen Llamas (Chapter 21) discuss linguistic accommodation, i.e. a phenomenon where a person adjusts their linguistic behavior as a reaction to their interactants’ social characteristics. The authors cover the Communication Accommodation Theory, discuss multiple considerations when designing an accommodation study, and present two example studies.

Section 3 covers situational variation and offers many suggestions for coding practices. In the section introduction (Chapter 22) Lauren Hall-Lew and Malcah Yaeger-Dror introduce some key concepts and theories relevant to the following chapters. They remind the reader that sociolinguistic interview corpora are not necessarily comparable despite similarity in labels and that keen attention should be paid to metadata. They also discuss the challenges and opportunities of corpora that are not based on traditional interview data.

Sali A. Tagliamonte (Chapter 23) briefly offers her best practices in documenting situational and contextual information. Tagliamonte covers all important factors such as geographic boundaries and dates but explains their importance in detail. The author also discusses any issues faced, providing a useful overall guide for constructing metadata. Frans Gregersen and Gert Foget Hansen (Chapter 24) continue with their own best practices for studying language change in real time. They go over all the steps from choosing an original study to preparing and carrying out the replication study. The authors provide a clear workflow and offer solutions to practical problems.

The perspective of interactional linguistics is covered in two chapters. Richard Ogden and Marina N. Cantarutti (Chapter 25) highlight a Conversation Analysis understanding of language as action, and how this affects the coding process. Jennifer Sclafani (Chapter 26) continues the interactional perspective and argues that public political discourse is not a singular style and uses a case study of an interview with Donald Trump to highlight the importance of the interactional context.

Variation and its coding in less traditional corpora are covered in the final chapters. Sonia Barnes and Lauren Hall-Lew (Chapter 27) argue that speech collected in a context of linguistic research is inherently reduced in stylistic variation and discuss at length two types of corpora that address this challenge: self-recorded speech and oral history recordings. Jacob Eisenstein (Chapter 28) covers the opportunities and challenges of social media data in sociolinguistic variation research. Andy Gibson (Chapter 29) explores perhaps the most unusual corpus introduced in the volume: a corpus of song. Gibson considers why and how such corpora might be built and used, investigates how other disciplines, mainly ethnomusicology and music information retrieval, approach music corpora creation, and offers important practical considerations.

The closing chapter by Tyler Kendall (Chapter 30) first discusses the nature and construction of sociolinguistic corpora, as well as several more detailed themes from the earlier chapters. Kendall then continues to address the challenges of corpus creation through his own work with the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL; Kendall & Farrington 2023). The chapter is concluded with a list of actions that can be taken to improve corpus methodology.

EVALUATION

The book addresses a wide readership, from students of sociolinguistics to researchers in computational linguistics, speech engineering, and related areas of language technology. While it frequently engages with fields such as variationism, interactional linguistics, and conversation analysis, its scope is broad and includes practices of data compilation, annotation and analysis. The editors and contributors acknowledge their debt to earlier research, while at times offering critical reassessment.

This book makes an important contribution to sociolinguistics by examining how research and corpus construction should be planned, carried out, and evaluated in the light of ethical, legal, and methodological concerns. It is organized in a clear and practical way: each chapter begins with an introduction and ends with summaries or recommendations. While the chapters focus on selected contexts and studies, this selective approach is understandable since no single volume could cover the full scope of sociolinguistic research, and the selection clearly reflects editorial choice and not randomness.

The corpora introduced in the chapters are versatile and the introduction of non-traditional corpora is a welcome addition. The language balance of the referenced studies and corpora at times lean toward the anglophone world, but it may just reflect the historically dominant status of English and the selection available. Despite this, the book introduces studies concerning languages beyond English and offers insights for changing the situation by providing guidelines for corpus creation for future studies.

Coverage of ethics was a strength of this volume. Many chapters foregrounded ethical considerations and offered insights for a change towards ethically sustainable research. Considering that legal does not always equal ethical and legislation can sometimes lag behind societal development, it is important to make sure that ethics does not trail behind legislation.

The volume includes some discussion of digital data but the volume’s appeal would have been enhanced by even further focus on modern concepts, such as web data and social media corpora as well as discussion of the effects of AI and large language models on the field, variable coding, or corpus creation. Without these modern angles, the volume appears rather traditional in its approaches.

Overall, the book brings together ethical, methodological, and social perspectives on studying language variation. It balances practical methodological advice on Institutional Review Board (IRB) protocols, data collection, metadata coding, and corpus construction with broader theoretical reflections on multilingualism, social class, ethnicity, and gender, among others. By stressing context, community perspectives, and the fluidity of social categories, it equips researchers to carry out ethical, rigorous, and socially informed work. The combination of practical resources, case studies, and analytical frameworks makes it valuable both as a reference and as a guide for advancing sociolinguistic research in diverse and dynamic settings.

REFERENCES

Kendall, Tyler and Charlie Farrington. 2023. The Corpus of Regional African American Language. Version 2023.06. Eugene, OR: The Online Resources for African American Language Project. [https://doi.org/10.7264/1ad5-6t35].

Cieri, Christopher, Lauren Hall-Lew, Katie Drager and Malacah Yaeger-Dror. 2025. Dimensions of Linguistic Variation. New York: Oxford University Press.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER(S)

Anna Ristilä and Selcen Erten-Johansson are pursuing their PhDs in Digital Language Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. Ristilä studies the topic landscape of Finnish parliamentary speeches and is interested in combining different computational methodologies to uncover new perspectives. Erten-Johansson does her research in Corpus Linguistics, investigating Turkish web text varieties (web registers) from situational, linguistic and cultural aspects.