Variationists have largely, though often implicitly, subscribed to a model of social cognition that characterizes complex social reasoning as conscious and deliberative (e.g. the sociolinguistic monitor), in opposition to rapid and automatic linguistic behaviors (e.g. the vernacular). This paper argues against that assumption, presenting evidence from the field of social cognition which documen...

In this paper, we discuss current trends in sociolinguistic work focusing on language in metropolitan Miami, an area we contend is underrepresented in the sociolinguistics literature given the unique contact situation that has arisen there during the past half century. We focus our attention on four main areas of theoretical and empirical concern: (1) Spanish–English bilingualism, (2) issues re...

Distinguishing linguistic change at the community level (‘generational change’) from linguistic change at the individual level (‘age grading’) is ‘‘one of the major issues in contemporary sociolinguistics’’ (Tagliamonte 2012:247). This article gives a brief history of the study of language change in the community, before turning to the types of linguistic behavior that have been observed across...

Investigating local linguistic norms to discover larger patterns of language behaviour has been standard practice in sociolinguistic study. Looking closely at socially salient variables reveals patterns that problematize accepted trajectories of variation as traditional and newly emerging sociolinguistic identities interact. This paper integrates findings from multiple complementary projects to...

Sociolinguistic research suggests that US Hispanic and Spanish consumers may differ in their response to ads with English and Spanish. An experiment with US Hispanic (N = 97) and Spanish (N = 132) participants showed that, although US Hispanic participants indicated that they used more English and less Spanish in various situations, and had a less positive general attitude to English than did S...

Throughout the history of Greek, there has been a tension between and among different geographic dialects and different stylistic registers of usage, a situation with both purely linguistic and decidedly sociolinguistic dimensions. In this presentation, along with some discussion of the general evidence bearing on this tension from various stages of Greek, I survey some of the particular eviden...

Although stylistic variation within social networks has been described in adults, this topic remains under-researched in children. One question that remains unanswered is the extent to which stylistic variation is the result of automatic alignment or of intentional, pragmatically motivated adjustment. We present an in-depth sociolinguistic case study of a 10-year-old boy, his family and four fr...