ABSTRACT
This chapter clarifies the distinctive challenges that the Community of Practice (CofP) model has brought to language research, for it has generated new methods and permitted new questions to be asked, breaking down other orthodoxies. It generates new insights by examining how the CofP model might work in concert with other models. Indeed, it is in the overlap between social aggregates in a research site that the most novel insights have been emerging. The ethnographic participant observation brings the most reliable verification of a group’s status as a CofP. Even in the foundational sector of language variation and change there is room for more reflection about the importance of the dynamic intersection of different social aggregates and their practices. Social constructs such as gender and sexuality (among others) are entangled with spatiality, community and other group affiliations in ways that are not always immediately obvious.
