Corpus Linguistics for Sociolinguistics: A guide for research (Routledge Corpus Linguistics Guides)

Winner of the 2026 ‘Aquilino Sánchez’ Research Award

Corpus Linguistics for Sociolinguistics is an accessible and practical introduction to how corpus linguistics can be used to study language variation and change.

This book introduces sociolinguistic concepts, sociolinguistic theory and up-to-date research from key areas of variation and change, including age, gender, style, varieties, language online, language and the media, historical change, and diachronic variation, and explores them from a corpus linguistics perspective. Further, the book illustrates the basics of corpus-linguistic methods and demonstrates the use of a vast range of freely available corpora suited to the study of sociolinguistic variation and change.

With its in-chapter exercises and discussion questions, and online supplementary resources, this text is key reading for students and researchers of corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics.

Joan O’Sullivan is Lecturer in English Language and Literature and Programme Coordinator at Mary Immaculate College Limerick. She is the author of Corpus Linguistics and the Analysis of Sociolinguistic Change: Language Variety and Ideology in Advertising.

Carolina P. Amador-Moreno is Professor of English Linguistics and works at the University of Extremadura. She is the author of Orality in Written Texts: Using Historical Corpora to Investigate Irish English (1700–1900) and co-editor of Digitally-Assisted Historical English Linguistics and Expanding the Landscapes of Irish English Research.

Anne Barron is Professor of English Linguistics at the Leuphana University Lüneburg. She is author and co-editor of several volumes including The Routledge Handbook of Pragmatics.