The only book offering an overview of third-wave variation research and theory, which is an approach centered on social meaning.

An important new study of the social meaning of sociolinguistic variation.

The study of variation and change is at the heart of the sociolinguistics. Providing a wide survey of the field, this textbook is organised around three constraints on variation: linguistic structure, social structure and identity, and social and linguistic perception. By considering both structure and meaning, Scott F. Kiesling examines the most important issues surrounding variation theory, including canonical studies and terms as well as challenges to them.

This monograph takes up recent advances in social network methods in sociology, together with data on economic segregation, in order to build a quantitative analysis of the class and network effects implicated in vowel change in a Southern American city. Studies of sociolinguistic variation in urban spaces have uncovered durable patterns of linguistic difference, such as the maintenance of blue collar/white collar distinctions in the case of stable linguistic variables. But the underlying interactional origins of these patterns, and the interactional reasons for their durability, are not well understood, due in part to the near-absence of large-scale network investigation. This book undertakes a sociolinguistic network analysis of data from the Raleigh corpus, a set of conversational interviews collected form natives of Raleigh, North Carolina, from 2008-2017. Acoustic analysis of the corpus shows the rapid, ongoing retreat from the Southern Vowel Shift and increasing participation in national vowel changes. The social distribution of these trends is explored via standard social factors such as occupation as well as innovative network variables, including a measure of nestedness in the community network. The book aims to pursue new network-based questions about sociolinguistic variation that can be applied to other corpora, making this key reading for students and researchers in sociolinguistics and historical linguistics as well as those interested in further understanding how existing quantitative network methods from sociological research might be applied to sociolinguistic data.

This study of sociolinguistic variation examines the relation between social identity and ways of speaking. Studying variations in language not only reveals a great deal about speakers' strategies with respect to variables such as social class, gender, ethnicity and age, it also affords us the opportunity to observe linguistic change in progress. The volume brings together leading experts from a range of disciplines to create a broad perspective on the study of style and variation. Beginning with an introduction to theoretical issues, the book goes on to discuss key approaches to stylistic variation in spoken language, 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.

Style refers to ways of speaking - how speakers use the resource of language variation to make meaning in social encounters. This 2007 book develops a coherent theoretical approach to style in sociolinguistics, illustrated with copious examples. It explains how speakers project different social identities and create different social relationships through their style choices, and how speech-style and social context inter-relate. Style therefore refers to the wide range of strategic actions and performances that speakers engage in, to construct themselves and their social lives. Coupland draws on and integrates a wide variety of contemporary sociolinguistic research as well as his own extensive research in this field. The emphasis is on how social meanings are made locally, in specific relationships, genres, groups and cultures, and on studying language variation as part of the analysis of spoken discourse.

Centering stances, positionalities, and style, the third wave of sociolinguistic study positions individuals at the heart of its analysis. Understood as a continuation of the first and the second waves, which sought to elucidate correlations between linguistic features and broad socio-demographic groups (first wave) or locally relevant categories and networks (second wave), the third wave focuses on the social meaning of variable linguistic features. It recognizes that speakers agentively employ the linguistic resources at their disposal to signal group memberships, construct their personae, and position themselves in interaction. However, research on the third wave has been, to the present, largely focused on the English language. Because the resulting sociocultural and linguistic biases are baked into our current understanding of why speakers select particular linguistic and stylistic features, a broader exploration of linguistic variation and social meaning in other languages is sorely needed. To tackle the questions raised by the third wave in Spanish-speaking contexts (e.g., How are social meanings linked to particular linguistic forms? How is social meaning structured? How does linguistic use affect social meaning? How do social meanings relate to one another? What is the role of social meaning in language variation and change?) we have mobilized scholars at the vanguard of Spanish sociolinguistics to share their work in this Special Issue. In doing so, we seek to further extend the third wave to the Spanish-speaking world and deepen, develop, and enrich the scope of third-wave research.