This 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. Beginning with an introduction to theoretical issues, the book goes on to discuss key approaches to stylistic variation.

Introduction John R. Rickford and Penelope Eckert; Part I. Anthropological Approaches: 1. 'Style' as distinctiveness: the culture and ideology of linguistic differentiation Judith T. Irvine; 2. Variety, style-shifting, and ideology Susan Ervin-Tripp; 3. The ethnography of genre in a Mexican market: form, function, variation Richard Bauman; 4. The question of genre Ronald Macaulay; Part II. Attention Paid to Speech: 5. The anatomy of style shifting William Labov; 6. A dissection of style shifting John Baugh; 7. Style and social meaning Penelope Eckert; 8. Zeroing in on multifunctionality and style Elizabeth Closs Traugott; Part III. Audience Design and Self-Identification: 9. Back in style: reworking audience design Allan Bell; 10. Primitives of a system for 'style' and 'register' Malcah Yaegar-Dror; 11. Language, situation and the relational self: theorising dialect-style in sociolinguistics Nikolas Coupland; 12. Couplandia and beyond Howard Giles; 13. Style and stylizing from the perspective of a non-autonomous sociolinguistics John R. Rickford; Part IV. Functionally Motivated Situational Variation: 14. Register variation and social dialect variation: re-examining the connection Edward Finegan and Douglas Biber; 15. Conversation, spoken language and social identity Lesley Milroy; 16. Style and the psycholinguistics of sociolinguistics: the logical problem of language variation Dennis R. Preston.