This chapter introduces the study of language ideologies and the relationship between language, social belonging, and social order, particularly in the context of late modernity. It approaches linguistic categories as discursively constructed rather than naturally occurring. This frames language as a key lens for understanding human social organisation, emphasising that ideas about language reflect and co-construct broader social and political ideologies. Through a discussion of sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological theories, the chapter critiques essentialist views of language. It introduces concepts such as social indexicality, standard language, prestige, and centring institutions to explore how language acquires social meaning and status. The chapter also examines the material dimensions of language, including the role of writing, sound, and tangible artefacts such as grammars and dictionaries in shaping linguistic ideologies and language categories. It lays the foundations for understanding languages as dynamic, constructed phenomena embedded in specific historical, cultural, and material contexts.

In this chapter we will disco≠≠≠ver that language variation is a normal characteristic of speech on all language levels: in the sounds of accents, words, in grammar but also in discourse. When speaking, we always face alternative choices, and these are determined by our regional and social backgrounds and by the context of situation. We will discuss the concept of the sociolinguistic variable in more detail and find that variation is rule-conditioned and systematic. We focus on all actors and factors involved: the social dimension of variation (individuals, groups, communities) and its social correlates (region, class, gender, ethnicity, education). Last but not least, we will look at the spread of innovative features and trace patterns of diffusion from individual speakers, the point of origin of change, throughout wider society (via processes such as actuation, diffusion, and embedding).

In this chapter we trace the development of the field from its beginnings to the present. Before the start of sociolinguistics proper in the early 1960s, regional dialectologists had already made considerable efforts to explore the spatial dimension of language variation, using different methodologies to collect data on regional dialects. The impact of the so-called sociolinguistic turn is discussed with reference to Labov’s early work (on the island of Martha’s Vineyard and in New York City), and some principal findings and methods of early work in the field are introduced. We will take a first look at the subsequent waves of variationist sociolinguistics, social network theory and communities of practice, which entail a focus on individual speakers and their social grouping and ordering as well as their orientation and affiliation with other speakers in indexical relationships. The chapter concludes with some recent developments and a presentation of current research themes.

The chapter establishes the role of context in an analysis. This is done by defining context, presenting a context continuum that can be used to understand an object of study, and introducing the types of conditions that shape understandings of discourse. Six different approaches to studying context are discussed in this chapter: systemic functional linguistics, the SPEAKING model, frames, indexicality, contextualization cues, and next-turn proof procedure. After reading this chapter, readers will understand what context is and why it is important; be able to study context using different models and constructs; and know how discourse and context work together to create meaning.

This chapter gives an overview of the relation between indexicality, deixis, and space in gesture from a semiotic and a linguistic point of view. Directive pointing gestures are not the only type of cospeech gestures that contributes to deixis. Iconic gestures that form part of the multimodal utterance may instantiate the targets to be pointed at and function as the deictic object of the deictic relation. In turn they may be interpreted as signs that stand for something else. A Peircean approach combined with a Bühlerian one, as suggested in this chapter, not only allows for a tertium comparationis with respect to the modality of the deictic and indexical signs under investigation. It also provides us with tools for representing semiotic processes like complex sign concatenation (e.g. deixis at signs vs. deixis at non-signs; deixis at metonymies or metaphors) as well as the collaborative creation of deictic space (sphere-like, map-like, screen-like; separated or shared) in multimodal interaction. The proposed schema of four semiotic subfields of space substantiates the view that space has to be thought of as a dynamic process of semiosis, not as a static entity.

This chapter reviews the study of variation in gesture and its theoretical underpinnings in the field of gesture studies. It questions the use of culture, language, or nationality as the default unit of analysis in studies of gesture variation. Drawing on theoretical developments in sociolinguistics and recent anthropologial analyses of gesture, it argues for the possibility that social factors and divisions other than linguistic/cultural boundaries may provide a more robust and comprehensive theoretical account for variation in gesture.

The notion of “context” is currently being deployed in Discourse Analysis within approaches that subscribe to its constitutive nature. Rather than being extraneous to talk and text, context is conceptualized as an integral part of discourse, in a mutually constitutive text-context relationship. This chapter will cover key insights from three influential and affiliated ways of analyzing context: context as dynamically and interactionally achieved; context as rooted in metapragmatic awareness; and context as historicized and multidimensional. The chapter will then illustrate how these three key insights manifest themselves in the framework of small stories research. After presenting these three features of context, the chapter will focus on two core issues at the forefront of current concerns, namely ambiguity in delineating “context,” and occurrences where what can be postulated as “relevant context” is not readily retrievable from textual data. Picking up on these issues, we argue that future research will need to address discourses and contexts becoming ever more fragmented, dispersed, and even disintegrated through new communication technologies. In this respect, an analytical focus on metapragmatic awareness may aid the identification of interactionally relevant features of context as well as of the (re)affirmation of participants’ shared meanings.

Sound empirical analysis draws upon (and refines) theories about a particular set of concepts, and understanding the social meaning of grammatical variation requires that we study language as it relates to social practice and forms of social engagement. Chapter 3 interrogates how sociolinguists study social meaning and the processes involved in meaning making. It explains the concepts that we need to know to understand how social meaning develops (the sign, style, persona, social type, indexicality, character type, stance, index, icon, sound symbolism, qualia, rhematisation, indexical field, stance accretion, erasure, axis of differentiation, and enregisterment), providing detailed exemplification from the Midlan High dataset. The chapter also considers the techniques required to understand how these concepts operate (experimental perception studies, ethnography, pragmatic analysis). Given that social meaning may interact with pragmatics, this chapter also highlights the need to combine research on the pragmatics of spoken language with variationist work on the social embedding and social distribution of linguistic variables.

Does the iconic status of a highly stigmatised linguistic variant like negative concord (e.g., I didn’t do nothing) more tightly constrain the social meanings associated with it? In exploring how we infer social meaning about negative concord, this chapter reveals that its precise syntactic configuration (the presence of two negative elements - n’t and nothing in the example above) may convey pragmatic meaning associated with emphasis, stress, surprise or remarkability. However, its highly stigmatised status constrains the extent to which these subtle meanings are perceived. For most of the young people at Midlan high, its stigmatised social associations are antithetical to their persona style and this inhibits their use of negative concord in any circumstances. However, some, in particular, the Townies, exploit both the pragmatic and social functions of negative concord to enrich the social meaning of their utterances. Importantly, this chapter emphasises how different speakers engage differently with the same grammatical variable, arguing that indexical fields need to reflect a range of social evaluations.

How stylistically sophisticated can the use of morpholexical/morphosyntactic variation be? By focusing on the range of social meanings that can be articulated by ‘levelled were’ (e.g., she were funny) – a regionally restricted variant of the type most frequently studied in sociolinguistics – this chapter explores the extent to which social meanings are fixed by a variant’s enduring association with place. It first considers how children acquire linguistic variation and the extent to which this process interacts with their ability to vary grammatical items stylistically. The analysis then explores how levelled were patterns by social class, parental place of birth, and community of practice at Midlan High. It provides evidence that all of these factors play a role in the use of levelled were, but that the most robust correlation is with community of practice. This data is used to argue that grammatical variants can mark distinctive social styles and personas, and that speakers can adapt their use of variation providing that (i) they have access to a range of variants, and (ii) that they are motivated to use them by virtue of its utility to them as a social symbol.