The quantitative study of linguistic variables has been an integral part of sociolinguistic research since the mid twentieth century, but it was only recently that the use of attitudinal data as potential quantitative correlates of language variation has been advanced, thereby uniting the agentive focus of recent variationist scholarship with quantifiable attitudinal findings. Based on the fact that conation is one of the components of attitudes, this chapter demonstrates how variable analysis can profoundly enrich our knowledge of language attitudes. The key strengths of using variable analysis (e.g. high levels of statistical rigour) are discussed at length, as well as the potential limitations and complications (e.g. how to align ‘big’ attitudinal data with social constructivist frameworks). The chapter discusses practical issues of research design, such as the tasks by means of which phonetic, morphosyntactic, and lexical variables can be elicited. Analytical approaches that are suitable to the analysis of both variationist and attitudinal data are addressed, with an emphasis on mixed-effects linear regression modelling. To illustrate the key points pertaining to variable analysis as a means of investigating language attitudes, the chapter concludes with a case study of Catalan as spoken in southern France, in the region of Northern Catalonia.

Researchers in linguistic anthropology and post-variationist sociolinguistics have over recent decades increasingly converged on a shared focus of attention: the unfolding real-time process of communicative activities that involve language – spoken/heard, written, digitally mediated – in concert with the other semiotic affordances that provide participants with the means to presume upon, and to (re)create, the very contexts in which forms of talk take place, with various effects in the here-and-now and beyond. Sociolinguists emerging from the confines of variationism have increasingly abandoned the operationalism and quasi-experimentalism of earlier work in favor of more ethnographically rich accounts that take note of the way that facts about sociophonetic variation not only reflect but also help to constitute identities also made manifest in other ways: through styles of dress, bodily practices, consumption patterns, etc. – a set of facts and interpretations often grouped by sociolinguists under the heading of “style.” Linguistic anthropologists, meanwhile, have been increasingly oriented to the way in which observed variation in language usage resolves itself into verbal (phonological, lexical, etc.) repertoires keyed to the interactional contours of recurring types of situation with recurring types of participant role – termed “registers.” Linguistic anthropologists have also been alert to the ways in which linguistic and semiotic resources that are by degrees regularized and presumed “normal” in some contexts (hence, “enregistered”) are, by that very fact, ripe for creative “recycling” and reuse in other contexts, with different effects. All of these disciplinary and transdisciplinary re-alignments, I argue, result from the introduction of a single centrally important analytic concept: indexicality. Introduced into modern linguistics by Jakobson and developed further by Jakobson’s student Silverstein, the concept of indexicality has enabled the recent co-alignment of erstwhile disciplinary forms of inquiry in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, and seems to be the fulcrum for much of the work now emerging at the intersection of these and other fields, including applied linguistics.