American Social Dialectology: A Statistical Appraisal

The past twenty years have seen the increasing use of quantitative methods in sociolinguistics. Investigated are the ways in which sociolinguists have analyzed quantitative data & certain problems are revealed with those analyses. Too often, linguists have allowed their graphs & tables "to speak for themselves," & have not subjected their results to statistical testing. Four statistical tests are suggested as relevant to sociolinguistic analysis: chi square, the test between means of large samples, the t-test, & the proportion test. In some cases, when these tests are applied to the data in published sociolinguistic studies, the previous conclusions are shown to be somewhat suspect. The proper use of statistics can aid the linguist in analyzing quantitative data. Graphs & tables are not self-explanatory; they require interpretation, & statistics provides the tools & the methods. 8 Tables, 15 References. AA.