In the new world of sociolinguistics, the simple concept of ‘style’ has a lot of work to do. The idea of ‘stylistic variation’ emerged from William Labov's seminal research on urban speech variation and language change, and it existed there in order to make a few key points only. As Labov showed, when we survey how speech varies, we find variation ‘within the individual speaker’ across contexts of talk, as well as between individuals and groups. Also, when individual people shift their ways of speaking, survey designs suggested that they do it, on the whole, in predictable ways that are amenable to social explanation.

From this initially narrow perspective, crucial as it was in establishing a basic agenda, a sociolinguistics of style has steadily come to prominence as a wide field of research, whether or not researchers use the term ‘style’ to describe their enterprise. Style used to be a marginal concern in variationist sociolinguistics. Nowadays it points to many of the most challenging aspects of linguistic variation, in questions like these: How does sociolinguistic variation interface with other dimensions of meaning-making in discourse? What stylistic work does variation do for social actors, and how does it blend into wider discursive and socio-cultural processes? Are there new values for variation and for style in the late-modern world?

When we work through issues like these, some important boundaries shift. For one thing, the study of sociolinguistic variation becomes very much wider.