We present an approach to detect stylistic variation across social variables (here: gender and social class), considering also diachronic change in language use. For detection of stylistic variation, we use relative entropy, measuring the difference between probability distributions at different linguistic levels (here: lexis and grammar). In addition, by relative entropy, we can determine which linguistic units are related to stylistic variation.This research is funded by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) under grants SFB1102: Information Density and Linguistic Encoding (www.sfb1102.uni-saarland.de) and the start-up grant for research projects from Saarland University
