The Isles of Scilly are an archipelago twenty-eight miles off the south-west coast of England, with a population of c. 2,000 people. The current indigenous population is believed to have descended from 1571, when the islands were repopulated by a member of the aristocracy who leased the islands from the British Crown. The islands’ leasing continued until 1920, when all but one island reverted to the Duchy of Cornwall. Metalinguistic commentary from the sixteenth century onwards suggests that Scillonians are perceived as more cultured, better educated and better spoken than their mainland counterparts. By drawing on oral history data, this vignette will explore the accuracy of these perceptions. To do so, it examines the extent to which phonetic features of Scillonian English relate to traditional varieties of Cornish English, on the one hand, and standard English, on the other. In explaining the patterns of linguistic variation found on the islands, consideration is given to the presence (or not) of the Cornish language on the islands, dialect contact, the ‘feudal-like’ system of governance, the peculiarities of education practices, and the identity factors that affect how and why different groups of Scillonians use distinctive linguistic variants.

The chapter ’Linguistic Scratching Posts’ looks at how to analyse the collected data to describe a linguistic variety. Taking a dialectological approach, it shows lexical, morphological, and orthographical variation in a list of cat-related keywords. It also uses the categories of the feline purrspective and the human perspective, which illustrate the semantic variation in cat-related digital spaces. All the categories are listed with examples from the data. To show the vastness of the number of users and posts we are dealing with, the chapter provides some statistics for the four social media platforms from which the data was collected: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube.

Like many other sub-fields of sociolinguistics, two seemingly unbridgeable gaps exist in the sociolinguistic study of multilingualism and identity in urban settings. First, existing studies tend to examine Western and/or English-speaking societies only; and moreover, they do so by using either quantitative or qualitative methods and rarely considering both approaches. As a result, relevant theories have been developed without taking into consideration cases outside these sites using a more comprehensive methodological approach. This chapter presents a case study of urban multilingualism in Ningbo in Eastern China to demonstrate how investigations of non-Western/non-English multilingual settings incorporating interdisciplinary methodologies can help to validate, challenge and, more importantly, expand our understanding of the sociolinguistics of multilingual identity, both theoretically and methodologically. Informed by a variationist approach and mixed-methods designs, the case study not only presents the multilingual sociolinguistic reality of Ningbo, but also shows how an interdisciplinary perspective enriches the field of sociolinguistics.

Nathalie Auger, who grew up between and within languages, pleads for a plural and inclusive "hospitable" pedagogy, a pedagogy of and for diversity. Through the encounter and study of social representations of plurilingualism and linguistic diversity within urban multilingualism, she has examined social and linguistic fractures that generate verbal and symbolic violence, multilingual walls and stigmatization. These experiences naturally led her to address these fractures in her work through a linguistically sensitive pedagogy.

This chapter picks up a range of applications of corpus linguistics that have not been covered in Chapters 6 and 7. These are: applications of bilingual corpora in contrastive linguistics and translation; forensic linguistics, with a particular focus on authorship; the automatic extraction of information or opinion; the identification of ‘fake news’; and the various topics discussed under the head of sociolinguistics. In most cases the work described here uses the methods discussed in earlier chapters, both quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative techniques are particularly important in sociolinguistics, where the differential frequencies of items used by different social groups are important. In addition, applications such as information mining or sentiment analysis stray into computational linguistics and natural language processing, and illustrate both the common ground and the disparities between these approaches and corpus linguistics.

Recent developments in the experimental syntax program have challenged some of the standard practices for collecting and analyzing linguistic evidence. In doing so, the methodological and theoretical gap between other areas of language science has begun to close. It is more common than ever before for research in theoretical syntax to incorporate multiple methodologies in the same study. Online elicitation methods, adopted from psycholinguistics, have been the most visible new addition to the theoretical syntactician’s toolbox. Yet observational data, in the form of corpora, has begun to play a larger role in contemporary syntactic investigation. The aim of this chapter is to contextualize the evolving role of corpus studies in syntactic investigation as a methodology that can be used to externally validate results from other methods as well as generate hypotheses. I highlight theoretical and practical advantages of employing corpora in tandem with other methods and point to future directions where gains can still be made.

In this chapter, I discuss the relationship between acceptability judgments and other experimental techniques and the broader goals of comparative syntax. Acceptability judgment experiments quantify the impact that a small number of factors exert on acceptability across a sample of participants. By contrast, comparative syntax has typically sought to characterize systematic similarities and differences between grammatical systems, on various scales of abstraction (languages, dialects, individual grammars). In this chapter, I argue that acceptability judgment experiments can contribute to comparative syntax by quantifying subtle judgments within a language as a ”check” on intuitive judgments collected from underresourced languages, by establishing reliable trends across languages, and by exploring individual differences within a population. I emphasize that careful factorial designs, appropriate controls, and previously established, theoretically informed hypotheses are crucial to the success of applying experimental approaches to comparative syntax.

Chapter 3 provides an overview of a number of theoretical proposals that have been put forward in the literature to account for language variation. It elaborates on models that combine formal generative theorizing and quantitative sociolinguistic methodology, in line with current minimalist analyses (Adger & Smith 2005; Sessarego & Gutiérrez-Rexach 2011; Sessarego 2014a). This chapter also stresses the importance of embracing a perspective of mutual complementation – rather than mutual exclusion – between these two fields, especially when the varieties under study consist of stigmatized vernaculars, for which it may be hard to obtain reliable grammaticality judgments and that may be characterized by high levels of inter- and intra-speaker speech variability (Cornips & Poletto 2005).

Standardization is the selection of one variant among others. It may concern any aspect of language use – pronunciation, orthography, morphology, syntax, the lexicon – and can occur within any social group, from the family to international organizations. Language policy is a conscious choice regarding a language or a linguistic feature. Such a choice, made by some social authority, is then implemented through language policy. State intervention may depend on calls for efficiency or calls for equality. Each policy and each plan for implementation is situated within a specific historical context. We trace two national histories often represented as being at opposite ends of the spectrum: the centralized power of the state in France and the decentralized power distributed to states and smaller governmental units in the USA. There are as many histories as there are languages and language varieties.

This chapter illustrates how some dictionaries published under the Collins imprint deal with aspects of language variation. It provides three case studies: the first looks at how dictionaries portray languages where multiple norms enjoy a similar level of prestige, using the example of Irish; the second looks at how a large monolingual dictionary of English acknowledges the existence of variation within the language; and the third investigates how variations in spelling, pronunciation and lexis are dealt with in two English dictionaries designed for learners of English. These case studies reveal how different target readerships can determine the treatment of language variation in different dictionaries. In the final sections of the chapter, the focus shifts to the impact of technology on the process of publishing dictionaries, showing how different considerations come into play when creating materials for online access and suggesting how this medium may eventually allow for a dictionary concept that reflects the full variety of language in use rather than being orientated towards a single prestigious standard variety.