26 - Sociolinguistics

Summary

The view of language as encoding predefined and enduring messages is what truly separated sociolinguistics in the early years from linguistic anthropology. A sociolinguistic variable is a set of competing linguistic forms (variants), whose patterns of occurrence are socially determined and potentially socially meaningful. The study of patterns calls for quantification and a focus on meaning raises interesting questions in a basically probabilistic enterprise. In stylistic practice, speakers make social-semiotic moves, reinterpreting variants, and combining and recombining them in a continual process of bricolage as highly idiosyncratic resources may combine with more widespread ones to construct a nuanced persona. Stylistic practice is a continual reinvention of meaning as speakers individually and severally move through situations and through time and across the life span. Stylistic practice can also be an important force in social change.