ABSTRACT
This chapter establishes the foundation and methods for the sociolinguistic investigation of lifespan and community variation and change through a combined real-time and apparent-time study of Swabian German. It provides a description of the Swabian language, the corpus, the linguistic and social variables explored, the measure of dialect density used throughout the investigation, and the six-step process followed for data collection and preparation. Four social factors are discussed in detail: community, gender, age, and education (a proxy for social class). The overall aim of this chapter is to establish a set of practices for analyzing, comparing, contrasting, and reconciling the output from a combined panel and trend study in order to ensure a reliable, replicable, and transparent study of sociolinguistic variation and change across real- and apparent-time.
