This pioneering comparative study provides the first quantitative, large-scale, cross-language analysis of subject pronoun variation, with a dataset representing more than 1000 speakers, twenty-four communities, and 6 languages: Persian, Spanish, European and Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin, and Swabian. Over 250,000 sites of pronominal variation are analysed to reveal community-specific and universal patterns of pronoun use, providing readers with key insights into how communities vary in their characteristic rates of pronoun use and in their sensitivity to linguistic and social conditioning factors. The project employs a range of quantitative measures, statistical techniques, and visualization tools to assist readers in investigating pronominal variation from cognitive, linguistic, and social perspectives. The book includes a freely downloadable R Markdown Project for readers to use in replicating and extending the methods provided to their own projects.

‘This book presents some of the coolest sociolinguistic research you will ever read. Focusing on pro-drop variation in six different languages, the authors explore and compare constraints and rates, raising such questions as why speakers of different pro-drop languages or dialects of the same language differ in the rates with which they choose a subject pronoun over a null subject. This remarkable study contributes to the fields of Variationist Sociolinguistics, Pragmatics, Language Typology, and Generative Theory of the Pro-Drop Parameter'

Richard Cameron - Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, University of Illinois at Chicago