Style and Sociolinguistic Variation

by Penelope Eckert (Editor), John R. Rickford (Editor)

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.

360 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1997

About the author

Penelope "Penny" Eckert is a professor of linguistics at Stanford University in Stanford, California, where she holds the position of "Albert Ray Lang Professor of Linguistics". She is a prominent scholar of variationist sociolinguistics and is the author of several scholarly works on language and gender. She served as the President of the Linguistic Society of America in 2018.