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Derek Denis is a linguist studying language change and variation, particularly Canadian English. His University of Toronto Mississauga profile describes using archival oral-history recordings to investigate earlier Ontario English and studying how Toronto's multilingual communities contribute to emerging speech patterns.^[ref]

The recordings make the comparison empirical: observed pronunciations and usages can be related to speakers and historical settings rather than inferred solely from spelling. His work in sociolinguistics asks how innovations arise and spread. A listed study of Toronto vowels connects that question to measurable sound patterns. He is a coauthor of Essentials of Linguistics (2nd edition) by Catherine Anderson and others.

By Catherine Anderson, Bronwyn Bjorkman, Derek Denis, Julianne Doner, Margaret Grant, Nathan Sanders and Ai Taniguchi. Cited sections3.3–3.5: articulators, consonant manner and vowel description; section3.10: syllables.

Sociolinguistics studies relationships between language use and social context, including systematic variation across speakers, communities and situations. A scientific study must specify the linguistic variable, the opportunities for it to occur, and how speakers and settings were sampled. Derek Denis's research on Canadian English connects historical variation with speech in multilingual Toronto communities.^[ref]

For a hypothetical study, suppose one pronunciation appears in 60 of 100 eligible tokens in one sample and 30 of 100 in another. The observed proportions are 0.60 and 0.30. Before attributing that difference to a social grouping, compare phonetic environments, word choices and recording conditions, and account for repeated observations from the same speaker. A group difference at one time is also different evidence from a measured change across time. These distinctions turn an impression about how people speak into an assessable statistical question.