Variationist sociolinguistics: Theoretical and methodological foundations

This volume presents a diverse anthology of research which shows how variationist sociolinguistic methods can be applied to varieties of German. The aims of this volume are three-fold: (1) to illustrate how traditional dialectology and quantitative sociolinguistics can be annexed and complemented through variationist methods to investigate a range of sociolinguistic phenomena, (2) to promote greater representation of German in the quantitative study of linguistic variation and change, and (3) to illustrate how variation in German at all levels of abstraction (e.g., phonetic, phonological, grammatical, lexical, discourse pragmatic) can be systematically structured and can be explained through internal structural and/or external social, stylistic, or geographic factors.