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Delimiting the Sydney speech community

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 December 2008

Barbara Horvath  and
David Sankoff
Barbara Horvath
Affiliation:
Department of Linguistics, University of Sydney
David Sankoff
Affiliation:
Centre de recherches mathématiques, Université de Montréal
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Abstract

Quantitative analyses of large data sets make use of both linguistic and sociological categories in sociolinguistic studies. While the linguistic categories are generally well-defined and there are sufficient tokens for further definition based on mathematical manipulation, the social characteristics such as socioeconomic class or ethnicity are neither. The familiar problem of grouping speakers by such sociological characteristics prior to quantitative analysis is addressed and an alternative solution – principal components analysis – is suggested. Principal components analysis is used here as a heuristic for grouping speakers solely on the basis of linguistic behaviour; the groups thus defined can then be described according to sociological characteristics. In addition, by naming the principal components, the major linguistic and social dimensions of the variation in the data can be identified. Principal components analysis was applied to vowel variation data collected as part of a sociolinguistic survey of English in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. (Sociolinguistics, variation studies, quantitative methods in linguistics, dialectology, Australian English, role of migrants in language change)

Type
Articles
Information
Language in Society , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , June 1987 , pp. 179 - 204
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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