36.3065, Reviews: Dimensions of Linguistic Variation: Christopher Cieri, Lauren Hall-Lew, Katie Drager, and Malcah Yaeger-Dror (eds.) (2025)

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Subject: 36.3065, Reviews: Dimensions of Linguistic Variation: Christopher Cieri, Lauren Hall-Lew, Katie Drager, and Malcah Yaeger-Dror (eds.) (2025)

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Date: 11-Oct-2025
From: Anna Ristilä [anna.ristila.digiling at gmail.com]
Subject: Linguistic Theories, Morphology, Syntax: Christopher Cieri, Lauren Hall-Lew, Katie Drager, and Malcah Yaeger-Dror (eds.) (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-1275

Title: Dimensions of Linguistic Variation
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Oxford University Press
           http://www.oup.com/us
Book URL:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/dimensions-of-linguistic-variation-9780197533499?utm_source=linguistlist&utm_medium=listserv&utm_campaign=linguistics

Editor(s): Christopher Cieri, Lauren Hall-Lew, Katie Drager, and
Malcah Yaeger-Dror

Reviewer: Anna Ristilä

SUMMARY
The book’s central concern is the relationship between linguistic
variation and social factors. Linguistic behaviour can be observed
directly through spoken, written, or signed signals, but social
factors are captured indirectly as metadata about users and contexts.
Since analysis is limited to what is recorded, the choice and level of
detail in metadata are crucial. Thus, this volume aims to guide
researchers in preparing new investigations, drawing attention to
demographic, attitudinal, and situational factors associated with
linguistic variation. It also problematizes social variables often
treated as straightforward. A key theme throughout the book is the
recognition that both social contexts and research practices are
dynamic, which has implications not only for the study of individuals
and communities but also for research design and ethics.
Section 1 highlights the role of ethics, law, and regulation in
sociolinguistic research. In the section introduction (Chapter 2)
Christopher Cieri stresses that all types of language data can be
useful if collected with a clear understanding of the study
population. The author warns that weak population models limit the
ability to link language use to social factors. Cieri also
distinguishes between what is legal and what is ethically acceptable,
noting that following the law does not guarantee meeting scholarly
standards. The author argues that ethics must be built into research
design, since potential harm may not always be foreseen by
Institutional Review Boards (IRBs).
Alexandra D’Arcy (Chapter 3) extends this discussion to social media
research, questioning assumptions that publicly accessible online
content is automatically exempt from ethical review. The author
identifies three levels of ethics—procedural, substantive, and
practical—and calls for researchers to think critically about how
communities might feel about their data being used. Denise DiPersio
(Chapter 4) adds a practical guide for preparing IRB-compliant
research protocols, covering objectives, methods, consent, and
confidentiality.
Section 2 turns to demographic coding, social attitudes, and
frameworks for analyzing variation. In the section introduction
(Chapter 5) Lauren Hall-Lew and Cieri discuss the difficulties of
representing human populations, stressing the importance of context,
relevance, and clear definitions. They also highlight the value of
intersectionality and indexicality in linking language features to
social categories. Shobha Satyanath (Chapter 6) applies these ideas to
multicultural and non-Western contexts, drawing on cases from India,
South Africa, Creole-speaking groups, and postcolonial English
varieties, and emphasizes the complexity of speech communities.
Barbara Bullock and Almeida Toribio (Chapter 7) address bilingual
speech, pointing out the challenges of analyzing data where languages
interact on multiple levels. They recommend detailed metadata on
proficiency, experience, and identity, and distinguish between visible
phenomena (e.g., code-switching) and less obvious processes (e.g.,
calquing). Devyani Sharma and Nathan Young (Chapter 8) build on this
by showing the need for combining external (etic) and community-based
(emic) perspectives, and for transparent, shareable data.
Other chapters explore dialect contact, ethnicity, and sociolinguistic
change. Yoshiyuki Asahi (Chapter 9) examines short-term and long-term
accommodation, showing how social and linguistic variables interact.
Rajend Mesthrie (Chapter 10) analyzes South African English, arguing
that ethnicity, understood as community-based and performative, is a
more useful concept than race. Sonya Fix, Renée Blake, Cecelia Cutler,
and Nicole Holliday (Chapter 11) focus on racial and ethnic variation
in New York City, using participant-driven approaches to capture
complex identities. Robert Bayley (Chapter 12) extends the discussion
to Latinx communities in North America, urging analysis that goes
beyond simple English–Spanish contrasts.
Social class and gender are also given careful attention in the book.
Joshua Hummel, Jordan Holley, Robin Dodsworth, and Suzanne Evans
Wagner (Chapter 13) discuss how to code social class, weighing
practicality against accuracy. Anne Fabricius (Chapter 14) reviews
models of class used in British sociolinguistics and considers their
relevance for other societies. Penelope Eckert (Chapter 15) critiques
binary gender coding and advocates approaches that recognize
intersectionality and social change.
Some variables are inherently very fluid and difficult to code. David
Bowie (Chapter 16) shows how a variable as seemingly simple as “age”
can be complex and sometimes even misleading. David Bowie and Malcah
Yaeger-Dror (Chapter 17) talk about religion and religiosity, while
Lauren Hall-Lew and Sarah van Eyndhoven (Chapter 18) introduce
political identity as a variable; both religiosity and political
identity are strongly about the presentation of self as well as
evaluation of others, which can change over time.
Language attitudes are covered in two chapters. Nicolai Pharao
(Chapter 19) focuses on the connection between language attitudes and
language change. Pharao covers commonly used methods and discusses how
the choice of methodology has implications for exposing overt and
covert norms. Carmen Llamas and Dominic Watt (Chapter 20) focus on two
direct methods of obtaining quantitative attitude data. They describe
their two variations of a visual analogue scale and how they improve
on some weak points of the regular version of the scale.
Dominic Watt and Carmen Llamas (Chapter 21) discuss linguistic
accommodation, i.e. a phenomenon where a person adjusts their
linguistic behavior as a reaction to their interactants’ social
characteristics. The authors cover the Communication Accommodation
Theory, discuss multiple considerations when designing an
accommodation study, and present two example studies.
Section 3 covers situational variation and offers many suggestions for
coding practices. In the section introduction (Chapter 22) Lauren
Hall-Lew and Malcah Yaeger-Dror introduce some key concepts and
theories relevant to the following chapters. They remind the reader
that sociolinguistic interview corpora are not necessarily comparable
despite similarity in labels and that keen attention should be paid to
metadata. They also discuss the challenges and opportunities of
corpora that are not based on traditional interview data.
Sali A. Tagliamonte (Chapter 23) briefly offers her best practices in
documenting situational and contextual information. Tagliamonte covers
all important factors such as geographic boundaries and dates but
explains their importance in detail. The author also discusses any
issues faced, providing a useful overall guide for constructing
metadata. Frans Gregersen and Gert Foget Hansen (Chapter 24) continue
with their own best practices for studying language change in real
time. They go over all the steps from choosing an original study to
preparing and carrying out the replication study. The authors provide
a clear workflow and offer solutions to practical problems.
The perspective of interactional linguistics is covered in two
chapters. Richard Ogden and Marina N. Cantarutti (Chapter 25)
highlight a Conversation Analysis understanding of language as action,
and how this affects the coding process. Jennifer Sclafani (Chapter
26) continues the interactional perspective and argues that public
political discourse is not a singular style and uses a case study of
an interview with Donald Trump to highlight the importance of the
interactional context.
Variation and its coding in less traditional corpora are covered in
the final chapters. Sonia Barnes and Lauren Hall-Lew (Chapter 27)
argue that speech collected in a context of linguistic research is
inherently reduced in stylistic variation and discuss at length two
types of corpora that address this challenge: self-recorded speech and
oral history recordings. Jacob Eisenstein (Chapter 28) covers the
opportunities and challenges of social media data in sociolinguistic
variation research. Andy Gibson (Chapter 29) explores perhaps the most
unusual corpus introduced in the volume: a corpus of song. Gibson
considers why and how such corpora might be built and used,
investigates how other disciplines, mainly ethnomusicology and music
information retrieval, approach music corpora creation, and offers
important practical considerations.
The closing chapter by Tyler Kendall (Chapter 30) first discusses the
nature and construction of sociolinguistic corpora, as well as several
more detailed themes from the earlier chapters. Kendall then continues
to address the challenges of corpus creation through his own work with
the Corpus of Regional African American Language (CORAAL; Kendall &
Farrington 2023). The chapter is concluded with a list of actions that
can be taken to improve corpus methodology.
EVALUATION
The book addresses a wide readership, from students of
sociolinguistics to researchers in computational linguistics, speech
engineering, and related areas of language technology. While it
frequently engages with fields such as variationism, interactional
linguistics, and conversation analysis, its scope is broad and
includes practices of data compilation, annotation and analysis. The
editors and contributors acknowledge their debt to earlier research,
while at times offering critical reassessment.
This book makes an important contribution to sociolinguistics by
examining how research and corpus construction should be planned,
carried out, and evaluated in the light of ethical, legal, and
methodological concerns. It is organized in a clear and practical way:
each chapter begins with an introduction and ends with summaries or
recommendations. While the chapters focus on selected contexts and
studies, this selective approach is understandable since no single
volume could cover the full scope of sociolinguistic research, and the
selection clearly reflects editorial choice and not randomness.
The corpora introduced in the chapters are versatile and the
introduction of non-traditional corpora is a welcome addition. The
language balance of the referenced studies and corpora at times lean
toward the anglophone world, but it may just reflect the historically
dominant status of English and the selection available. Despite this,
the book introduces studies concerning languages beyond English and
offers insights for changing the situation by providing guidelines for
corpus creation for future studies.
Coverage of ethics was a strength of this volume. Many chapters
foregrounded ethical considerations and offered insights for a change
towards ethically sustainable research. Considering that legal does
not always equal ethical and legislation can sometimes lag behind
societal development, it is important to make sure that ethics does
not trail behind legislation.
The volume includes some discussion of digital data but the volume’s
appeal would have been enhanced by even further focus on modern
concepts, such as web data and social media corpora as well as
discussion of the effects of AI and large language models on the
field, variable coding, or corpus creation. Without these modern
angles, the volume appears rather traditional in its approaches.
Overall, the book brings together ethical, methodological, and social
perspectives on studying language variation. It balances practical
methodological advice on Institutional Review Board (IRB) protocols,
data collection, metadata coding, and corpus construction with broader
theoretical reflections on multilingualism, social class, ethnicity,
and gender, among others. By stressing context, community
perspectives, and the fluidity of social categories, it equips
researchers to carry out ethical, rigorous, and socially informed
work. The combination of practical resources, case studies, and
analytical frameworks makes it valuable both as a reference and as a
guide for advancing sociolinguistic research in diverse and dynamic
settings.
REFERENCES
Kendall, Tyler and Charlie Farrington. 2023. The Corpus of Regional
African American Language. Version 2023.06. Eugene, OR: The Online
Resources for African American Language Project.
[https://doi.org/10.7264/1ad5-6t35].
Cieri, Christopher, Lauren Hall-Lew, Katie Drager and Malacah
Yaeger-Dror. 2025. Dimensions of Linguistic Variation. New York:
Oxford University Press.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER(S)
Anna Ristilä and Selcen Erten-Johansson are pursuing their PhDs in
Digital Language Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. Ristilä
studies the topic landscape of Finnish parliamentary speeches and is
interested in combining different computational methodologies to
uncover new perspectives. Erten-Johansson does her research in Corpus
Linguistics, investigating Turkish web text varieties (web registers)
from situational, linguistic and cultural aspects.



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