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A corpus-based sociolinguistic analysis of indefinite article use in London English Costas Gabrielatos & Eivind Torgersen (Lancaster University) This paper reports on the analysis of the use of indefinite article forms (a/an) in front of vowel sounds in spoken London English, which formed a part of the completed project Analysis of spoken London English using corpus tools (funded by the British Academy). The study used the Linguistic Innovators Corpus (LIC), a 1.4 million word corpus comprising the transcribed and marked-up interview data from the Lancaster/Queen Mary ESRC-funded project, Linguistic innovators: the English of adolescents in London (Kerswill et al. 2008), as well as the Corpus of London Teenage English (COLT)(Stenström et al. 2002). The research methodology combined approaches and techniques from sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics. Variables were examined individually and in cross-tabulations, using both manual/semi-automated and automated techniques (logistic regression analysis). The former analysis took account of the frequency of the a+ vowel pattern relative to the number of opportunities for a choice between a or an (ie vowel-initial words preceded by the indefinite article) and the proportion of speakers who used the pattern. The study examined both linguistic and sociolinguistic variables, but only the sociolinguistic variables yielded statistically significant results. This suggests that the linguistic variables play a minor role, if any at all, in the choice between a or an in front of a vowel sound. The sociolinguistic variables comprised the speakers’ sex, age, ethnicity and place of residence, as well as the …