The studies on lexical availability deal with the available lexicon, the set of words that speakers have in the mental lexicon and which use is determined by the specific topic of the communication. This article presents the preliminary results of an exploratory research on the lexical availability in the Polish language of a sample of 147 students from 6 secondary schools in 6 Polish cities. Following a sociolinguistic methodology, the analysis considers the incidence of variables such as ‘sex’, ‘sociocultural level’ and ‘educational level’.

The aim of this article is to present and review the research methods employed in Laura Gago Gómez’s recent study, Aproximación a la situación sociolingüística de Tánger-Arcila: variación léxica y grafemática (2018). Moreover, this article intends to evaluate the possibility of applying the methods of Hispanic research on lexical availability to Middle Arabic texts, after considering what kind of Middle Arabic texts should be taken into account for this purpose.