The identification of varieties (dialects) — which requires relating linguistic features to major social categories such as class, age, gender, ethnicity and geographical origin — is one of the main achievements of variationist sociolinguistics. The task is central to the aims of sociolinguistics in two ways. First, it reveals the presence of structured heterogeneity within linguistic variation. Second, it accounts for the social meaning of linguistic variants: through the definition of bounded “social”, “regional” or “ethnic” varieties, so-called inter-speaker variation is directly associated with group membership and linguistic features become social identity markers.

This article compares the results of measurements of objective language data with the subjective judgments of linguistically naïve individuals. The comparison is based upon recordings of speech orientated towards the standard language. The data surveyed are from the West Middle German city of Mainz and the northern Low German city of Neumünster. In both cases, recordings of council meetings, in which members of a defined social group are acting in an authentic situation, were evaluated. The data were first measured using a technique designed to quantify the phonetic divergence from the standard language. Subsequently, the recordings were played to various groups of non-specialists from different regions in both the Low German and Middle German dialect areas. Participants were asked to assess the speech of the councillors on a seven-step rating scale. The results show a high similarity between the intersubjective measurement of linguistic items and the metalinguistic judgments of the listeners.

Based on data from a Mid-German dialect area of Dresden, this article presents research on the structure and functions of regionalized intonation. The Dresden data comes from informal conversation-like settings and illustrates a contour that is typical of the Dresden city vernacular: a contour previously named and described as the Dresden Fallbogen. An analysis of the phonetic forms and phonological structures of the contour is provided, and its use and function in conversational interactions is described. Additional methods of investigating the perception and identification of these contours by subjects in an experimental setting are also given. The article concludes with remarks about the possible relevance of this contour as a signal of identity.

Drawn from ethnographic data collected in a small coastal village on Cape Breton Island, where tourism-related industries are emerging in response to the deep sea fishing crisis that hit the area in the early 1980s, this analysis focusses on the effects of tourism on linguistic practices and representations. It is argued that these effects are not without consequence on the way French-speakers in the region (re)construct their identity.

Increased contact with outsiders leads to two seemingly contradictory tendencies: differentiation and standardization. These two strategies exert a marked influence on the social structure of the Acadian community. In this particular case, speakers must constantly negotiate an equilibrium between the desire to assert their specificity through discriminating traits that showcase their linguistic as well as cultural differences, on the one hand, and their need to communicate with a broader audience, on the other, the latter entailing a certain degree of linguistic standardization. This analysis focusses on how these speakers manage to perform this balancing act between differentiation and standardization.

This article shows that linguistic variation is part of a speaker’s social repertoire and is used to achieve specific purposes. In order to better understand how social forces in specific contexts influence language varieties, I examine linguistic practices and the representation of these practices unfold in two economic settings involving minority francophone communities in Canada: a call centre (in southern Ontario) and the tourism sector (in Alberta).

Traditional accounts of style isolate individual variables and situate their use along a formality scale. Because it abstractly represents speaker interaction, this approach imposes a taxonomic distinction between stylistic and social constraints. By focussing on single variables in isolation, such accounts wrench individual variables out of the context that defines them. Recent accounts of style recognise the context-dependency of social meaning. We must therefore consider how a particular combination of linguistic and extralinguistic resources interact to produce an overall style that subsumes the traditional style/social constraint distinction. I explore how the styles created by a community of girls function to produce a system of distinction (Irvine 2001) in their high school, by considering how each group uses morphosyntactic and discourse-related variables to define themselves in relation to other social groups. The analysis reveals that sociolinguistic meaning is never achieved by a single group in isolation, but is the consequence of a collaborative negotiation of available resources.

This article questions the common usage of the concept of “linguistic variety” and the usual view of vernacular speech as the expression of a speaker’s identity. The term “variety” in linguistics has an ambiguous status: it is used to describe “linguistic representations” (social constructs) as well as actual linguistic practices. An alternative way of understanding the function of varieties in the sociolinguistic space is proposed: we explain how varieties relate to speech styles in a way that captures the social significance of linguistic variation. A case study about vowel lengthening in the French spoken in Belgium is then presented. Through both a quantitative and qualitative analysis, it is shown how marked regional variants are used to produce a particular social meaning, even among middle-class speakers.

This special issue of the Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique is devoted to the intriguing notion of représentation linguistique, an idea that developed in French (socio-)linguistics some ten years ago (cf. Jodelet 1993), following earlier work by Anne-Marie Houdebine (1982).

In their preface, Philippe Hambye and Anne Catherine Simon discuss one of the major tenets of this approach, namely the idea that représentation linguistique, in addition to being concerned with how language is represented in the human mind — and thus very much in line with the cognitive turn of linguistics — also implies that as a cognitive entity, language has no self-contained status in the sense of post-structualist, generative grammar. Rather, the way in which we language users look upon language is always socially contextualised. Whatever we know, in the largest sense of the word, about language and varieties of language is inextricably linked to the situations and social groups, the speakers and geographical regions, the linguistic genres and social styles that constitute it. Linguistic representations, understood as everyday knowledge of language, are therefore normatively organised. They have to do with how someone of a certain type (incumbent to a certain social category) is supposed to, or can be expected to speak, given certain typified circumstances, and what it means for him or her to speak in this way.