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Statistics
For many linguists, the ability to understand a statistical presentation is an
unnecessary skill. But for a growing number, particularly those that work with
sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics or some relatively recent
models of phonology and morphology, at least a reading knowledge of statistics
is a requirement.
This is not the place to teach statistics. If you are in one of the areas of study
that requires a sound understanding of statistics, you should take a statistics
course or find some other way to gain the knowledge you need. If, however, you
are an irregular consumer of statistics, you can work out the crucial bits of
information you need without too much difficulty as long as you do not try to
get too involved. If you are such a person and you find you really need to understand
the statistics that others produce in greater depth, or if you need to
produce your own statistics to prove some point, consult a professional. The
simplified presentation here is for those who are not trying to be expert in the
field.
Populations
The questions that linguists typically want to answer are large ones: what is
happening to such and such a vowel in the English spoken in Birmingham? Do
Americans use that and which differently from Britons? Are long words rarer
than short words? Do languages with a particular stress pattern also show particular
patterns of grammatical behaviour? And so on. These questions are
enquiring about the nature of a particular vowel in every utterance spoken by
any speaker from Birmingham within a particular time frame, between all
instances of that ever used in American English and those instances of it used