This book is about doing variation analysis. My goal is to give you a step-by-step guide which will take you through a variationist analysis from beginning to end. Although I will cover the major issues, I will not attempt a full treatment of the theoretical issues nor of the statistical underpinnings. Instead, you will be directed to references where the relevant points are treated fully and in detail. In later chapters, explicit discussion will be made as to how different types of analysis either challenge, contribute to or advance the basic theoretical issues. This is important for demonstrating (and encouraging) evolution in the field and for providing a sense of its ongoing development. Such a synthetic perspective is also critical for evolving our research in the most interesting direction(s). In other words, this book is meant to be a learning resource which can stimulate methodological developments, curriculum development as well as advancements in teaching and transmission of knowledge in variation analysis.

WHAT IS VARIATION ANALYSIS?

Variation analysis combines techniques from linguistics, anthropology and statistics to investigate language use and structure (Poplack 1993: 251). For example, a seven-year-old boy answers a teacher's question by saying, ‘I don't know nothing about that!’ A middle-aged woman asks another, ‘You got a big family?’ Are these utterances instances of dialect, slang, or simply performance errors, mistakes? Where on the planet were they spoken, why, by people of what background and character, in which sociocultural setting, under what conditions?