It's all for the birds

In this study, we first ask how observable attitudes towards birds change over time in English language corpora and, second, we investigate how culturally different attitudes manifest in corpora of different varieties of English. To answer these questions, we trace the historical development of bird references in a corpus spanning two centuries and compare attestations in select contemporary varieties. We carry out collocation analyses and sentiment analyses and create conceptual maps on data from the COHA Corpus as well as on the American, New Zealand, Singaporean and Tanzanian components of the GloWbE corpus. The results show that attitudes to birds are positive overall and a number of core associations exist. Culturally specific topics and societal attitudes are investigated by analysing collocates in the corpora. Key topics emerging from earlier varieties represented in COHA are about watching and hunting birds and using bird products. The contemporary American data shows a more distant and often symbolic relationship with birds. While in Tanzania, the touristic values are focused in the corpus data, the New Zealand data display a strong focus on wildlife protection and Singapore presents them in bird parks and with a view on culture-specific delicacies. The results of variationist approaches can thus clearly be useful not only to corpus linguistics, but also to the broader humanities and social sciences.