A language survey is conducted around the world for a variety of reasons.
- Measuring people's ability to speak and understand another language (usually community based, not school based) (multilingualism)
- studying people's attitudes about different languages (Rensch 1993)
- evaluating the differences and similarities in speech of communities that speak related speech forms, noting comprehension or collecting details of linguistic form (dialectology)[1][2][3]
- assessing the vitality of languages that may be disappearing (language death)[4][5]
- doing initial descriptions of languages in areas that are linguistically undescribed[6]
- ^ Labov, William. 1982. The social stratification of English in New York City. Washington, D. C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.
- ^ Backstrom, Peter C. 1992. "Wakhi." In Peter C. Backstrom and Carla J. Radloff (eds.), Languages of northern areas, 57-74. Sociolinguistic Survey of Northern Pakistan, 2. Islamabad: National Institute of Pakistan Studies, Quaid-i-Azam University and Summer Institute of Linguistics
- ^ Egland, Steven T., ed. 1978. La inteligibilidad interdialectal en México: Resultados de algunos sondeos. Mexico: Instituto Lingüístico de Verano (Mexico)|Instituto Lingüístico de Verano.
- ^ Statistics Canada. (1993). 1991 Aboriginal peoples survey: Language, tradition, health, lifestyle and social issues. Catalogue No. 89-533. Ottawa: Statistics Canada, Post Censal Surveys Program.
- ^ Ferreira, Jo-Anne and David Holbrook. 2002. Are they dying? The case of some French-lexifier creoles. La Torre 7(25): 367-397
- ^ King, Julie K. and John Wayne King, editors. 1984. Languages of Sabah: a survey report. (Pacific Linguistics C, 78.) Canberra: Australian National University.