Intended for both undergraduate and graduate students, this textbook presents a concise, clear, and well-illustrated introduction to the quantitative analysis of language. It is comprehensive and example-based, and it covers the basics of quantitative analysis of linguistic data and explores how this differs from qualitative approaches. At the same time, the book is also practical, helping the reader understand how to conceptualize, construct, and implement a quantitative investigation in linguistics. The book comprises eight chapters organized in two parts.

Part I (chapters 2–4) leads the reader through the fundamentals of quantitative research such as methodological premises and organization, variables and measurement, operationalization, causality, reliability and validity, hypothesis testing and theories, design and sample, and data coding. Chapter 2 outlines and illustrates the difference between quantitative and qualitative approaches and data treatments. It also discusses different types of variables and the question of causality, and introduces the concepts of reliability and validity. Examples from psycholinguistic research and phonological studies of dialect differences are provided. The studies help to emphasize the concept of the linguistic variable, which may have to do with frequency, speed, or variation among such elements as phonemes, words, or utterances. In quantitative sociolinguistic research, linguistic variables are correlated with sociodemographic variables such as socioeconomic class or gender. Chapter 3 effectively explains and illustrates various research designs (in relation to possible applications) and sampling techniques. It also includes brief advice on understanding rights and wrongs of conducting research with human subjects. Chapter 4 closes part I with a more elaborate discussion of questionnaire design and coding.

While part I is aimed at providing enough information so the reader could plan and design a quantitative study, part II (chapters 5–9) goes one step further and begins explaining what is to be done once the stages of planning, design, and data collection are completed. Chapter 5 examines ways of describing data using sums and frequencies, as well as their presentation through graphs, charts, and scatter-plots. Chapter 6 introduces basic means of data description and discusses the concept of normal distribution. This is followed by an introduction to probability, significance, and a range of statistical analyses in chapter 7. Chapter 8 is devoted to hypothesis testing, and chapter 9 deals with not normally distributed data to be tested by such non-parametric measures as the Spearman rank correlation test, Kendell’s tau test, Wilcoxon signed-rank test, and Mann-Whitney U test.

Overall, this excellent primer is a useful resource for a student needing to or thinking about starting a quantitative project in linguistics. It gives an efficient and clearly explained grounding in quantitative methodology, design, basic questionnaire construction, data description, and analysis, as well as providing suggestions on how to test hypotheses by running statistical tests with Excel. (Chapter 10 contains appendices with solutions for Excel.) The book will definitely capture students’ interest and inspire them to move on and try using more complex statistical software such as SPSS or R in replicating and/or constructing innovative quantitative studies.