Sociolinguistic study of variation and change has a long‐standing bias towards speech
communities in Western and especially Anglophone societies. We argue that our field …

While the field of variationist sociolinguistics has advanced rapidly since Labov (1966), it
remains the case that a socially informed theory of language change continues to be …

Variation in speech has always been important to phonetic theory, but takes center stage in
the growing area of sociophonetics, which places the role of the social at the heart of the …

Aims and objectives: I review several methods of constructing bridges between structural
linguistic variation in language contact situations and linguistic attitudes and prestige …

This study examines the variable use and the social meaning of a contact‐induced
phenomenon in Basque, Differential Object Marking, to explain the emergence of new …

Aims: The goal of this special issue is to anchor an understanding of language variation and
change in a relatively newly adopted framework for researching 'new speakers' of …

Variationist sociolinguists have now collectively spent decades gathering vernacular
language data, enriching linguistic theory through detailed empirical analysis. What the field …

Contrary to Labov's principle of style shifting, studies in language obsolescence portray
speakers of dying languages as 'monostylistic', a characterization questioned here …

The field of contact linguistics has long argued for the paramount importance of social
factors in understanding the outcomes of linguistic contact. In contrast, linguistic ideologies …

Documenting sociolinguistic variation in lesser-studied languages presents methodological
challenges, but also offers important research opportunities. In this paper we examine three …