Reflecting a multitude of developments in the study of language change and variation over the last ten years, this extensively updated second edition features a number of new chapters and remains the authoritative reference volume on a core research area in linguistics.

Table of Contents

• Endorsement
• Contributors
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Studying Language Variation: An Informal Epistemology
• Part I Data Collection
• 1 Entering the Community: Fieldwork
• 2 Data in the Study of Variation and Change
• 3 Investigating Historical Variation and Change in Written Documents: New Perspectives
• Part II Evaluation
• 4 The Quantitative Paradigm
• 5 Sociophonetics
• 6 Comparative Sociolinguistics
• 7 Language with an Attitude
• Part III Linguistic Structure
• 8 Variation and Syntactic Theory
• 9 Investigating Chain Shifts and Mergers
• 10 Discourse Variation
• Part IV Language and Time
• 11 Real Time and Apparent Time
• 12 Child Language Variation
• 13 Adolescence
• 14 Patterns of Variation Including Change
• Part V Social Differentiation
• 15 Investigating Stylistic Variation
• 16 Social Class
• 17 Gender, Sex, Sexuality, and Sexual Identities
• 18 Ethnicity
• Part VI Domains
• 19 Social Networks
• 20 Communities of Practice
• 21 Constructing Identity
• Part VII Contact
• 22 Space, Diffusion and Mobility
• 23 Linguistic Outcomes of Bilingualism
• 24 Koineization
• 25 Supraregionalisation and Dissociation
• Part VIII Sociolinguists and Their Communities
• 26 Community Commitment and Responsibility
• Postscript