Developing a sociocultural orientation to variation in language

This article aims to develop a sociocultural orientation to variation in language. It engages with Eckert’s recent reconceptualization of variationist sociolinguistic theory as an enterprise that privileges social meaning and communicative activity over language structure. Four concepts are presented. (1) Language structure is emergent and, therefore, structural regularity and variation arises from more frequent ways of using language. (2) Language and activity types are mutually contingent so that language recognized as allowable is determined by the activity in progress and, recursively, activities are recognized by the actions that constitute them. (3) Meaning is contingent upon the dialectics of micro-social and macro-social frames. (4) Speakers make use of collaboratively constructed conventions to design their own meanings in concrete communicative activity.