This book demonstrates the contribution that statistics can and should make to linguistic studies‎.‎ The range of work to which statistical analysis is applicable is vast‎:‎ including‎,‎ for example‎,‎ language acquisition‎,‎ language variation and many aspects of applied linguistics‎.‎ The authors give a wide variety of linguistic examples to demonstrate the use of statistics in summarising data in the most appropriate way‎,‎ and then making helpful inferences from the processed information‎.‎ The range of techniques introduced by the book will help the reader both to evaluate and make use of literature which employs statistical analysis‎,‎ and to apply statistics in their own research‎.‎ Each chapter gives step‎-by‎-step explanations of particular techniques using examples from a number of fields‎,‎ and is followed by extensive exercises‎.‎ The early part of the book provides a thorough grounding in probability and statistical inference‎,‎ and then progresses through methods such as chi‎-squared and analysis of variance‎,‎ to multivariate methods such as cluster analysis‎,‎ principal components analysis and factor analysis‎.‎ None of these techniques requires the reader to have a grasp of mathematics more complex than simple algebra‎.‎ Students and researchers in many fields of linguistics will find this book an invaluable introduction to the use of statistics‎,‎ and a practical text for the development of skills in the application of statistics‎.‎