17 Managing Legacy Data in a Sociophonetic Study of Vowel Variation and Change

This data management use case provides a description of the workflow of a sociophonetic study of language variation and change using legacy data (Grama 2015). This study investigated change in the vowel system of Pidgin (known to linguists as Hawai'i Creole), an English-lexified creole spoken in Hawai'i. In that study, two existing corpora were used to conduct a trend study that compared Pidgin speakers at two time points: the 1970s and the 2000s. Analysis was conducted on acoustic vowel measurements taken from speech elicited using sociolinguistic-style interviews (cf. Labov 1972). This use case serves as a meta-analysis of the methods applied in the Grama study and is intended for researchers interested in using naturalistic legacy data to identify longitudinal change. Throughout the chapter, methodological considerations are made that concern sociophonetic studies, the management of legacy data (especially when that data was not originally designed to address sociophonetic research questions), and further issues that are relevant to variationist research.