1- Introduction

Question 1

Sociolinguistics

Answer 1

The study of language in relation to social factors, including differences of regional, class, and occupational dialect, gender differences, and bilingualism.

Question 2

Interlocutor

Answer 2

The people who are talking together are each other’s interlocutors.

Question 3

Social meaning

Answer 3

Inferences about speakers or the variety they use and the interpretations we draw about how those speakers are positioned in social space because of this.

Question 4

Weighting

Answer 4

An adjustment that can be made to raw frequencies of a variant so as to take into account any biases or skewing of its overall distribution.
Expresses the probability or likelihood with which a variant will occur in a given linguistic environment or with a given non-linguistic factor.

Question 5

Social address

Answer 5

Individual speakers’ linguistic behavior can reflect their belonging to various categories

Question 6

Vernacular

Answer 6

Style adopted by speakers when paying least attention to speech (Labov 1972: 208) Variety learned before adolescence (Labov 1984: 29) “The language of locally based communities” (Eckert 2000: 17).

Question 7

Observer’s paradox

Answer 7

To obtain the data that is most important for linguistic theory, we have to observe how people speak when they are not being observed.

Question 8

Surreptious recording

Answer 8

Recording people without them knowing of it. It can bring legal, ethical, and practical issues.

Question 9

Written surveys

Answer 9

A method of gathering information using relevant questions from a sample of people with the aim of understanding populations as a whole.

Question 10

Fieldworker-administered surveys

Answer 10

A questionnaire completed in the presence of an interviewer. The interviewer may also verbally ask some or all of the questions.

Question 11

Rapid and annonymous surveys

Answer 11

It is done by asking the speaker a question that will cause them to answer with the token you’re looking for.
The aim of these surveys is to elicit speech tokens in a more subtle, albeit creepier, manner in which the subject is unaware that you are studying their speech.

Question 12

The sociolinguist interview

Answer 12

Semi-structured interviews with open and engaging questions to elicit vernacular speech.

Question 13

Ethnographic approach/participant observation

Answer 13

A qualitative research methodology in which the researcher studies a group not only through observation, but also by participating in its activities.

Question 14

Triangulation

Answer 14

A researcher’s use of several independent tests to confirm their results.