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Sociolinguistic research has traditionally examined stylistic variation as a way of understanding how speakers may use language indexically. Quantitatively, research has sought to correlate observed patterns of variation across such external parameters as context or topic with the ways in which speakers linguistically orient themselves to their immediate surroundings or to some other socially-salient reference group. Recently, this approach has been criticized for being too mechanistic. In this paper, I present a new method for examining stylistic variation that addresses this critique, and demonstrate how an attention to speakers’ motivations and interactional goals can be reconciled with a quantitative analysis of variation. I illustrate the proposed method with a quantitative examination of systematic patterns of prosodic variation in the speech of a group of Israeli men who are all members of various lesbian and gay political-activist groups.

Scholars of American Judaism have argued that American Jews are losing their sense of a distinctive Jewish identity, and the cultural practices concomitant with that identity. This general attrition has resulted in what many label the mosaic identity of American Jews, whereby multiple group affiliations exist in tandem and in conflict. Utilizing a reworked framework of language style (based on Bell 1984, 2001), I demonstrate how the claim that Jewishaffiliated practice is compartmentalized and relegated only to specifically Jewish contexts is supported through an examination of the variable pronunciation of word-final /t/. This paper illustrates the ways in which quantitative and qualitative analyses canwork together to create a more developed picture of Reform American Judaism.