Style and Sociolinguistic Variation

The volume brings together leading experts from a range of disciplines to create a broad perspective on the study of style and variation in spoken language. The book discusses key approaches to stylistic variation, including such issues as attention paid to speech, audience design, identity construction, the corpus study of register, genre, distinctiveness and the anthropological study of style. Rigorous and engaging, this book will become the standard work on stylistic variation. It will be welcomed by students and academics in sociolinguistics, English language, dialectology, anthropology and sociology.

"It is one of the virtues of this book that what one author suggests or asserts may be supplemented or argued with by another. Reading these papers is therefore not unlike attending a thoughtful debate carried on by experts[...]it is a rigorous and well-referenced (there is a 32-page bibliography) exploration of style from a variety of perspectives. In addition, the work provides fascinating critiques of the many viewpoints presented during the workshop."
-Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development

"Taking into account this gathering of refined versions of classical approaches to style with others completely new perspectives on the one hand, and the extensive reflections on each of these that other experts offer, the book constitutes an excellent up to date of research into the role of style in sociolinguistic variation and represents a serious attempt to solve the problems that its analysis poses. The collection is a fundamental reference, therefore, for students and academics whose works have to deal more or less directly with the complex but at the same time fascinating task of interpreting stylistic variation in speech."
-Virginia Acuna Ferreira, Universidade de Vigo, Estudios de Sociolinguistica

"The book is definitely the best integrative and comparative overview of sociolinguistic variation research available[...]The book definitely deserves to be put onto the required reading list for all directly involved in vernacular language programs, and especially those of us who see the importance of register studies for applied issues in literacy. On the whole, one gets much more out of this book than you could out of any average book on sociolinguistics, regardless of whether you work in language description, literacy, or translation."
-Oliver Stegen, SIL International