ABSTRACT
This chapter first summarizes the significant findings concerning language and social network position in Chapters 3, 4, and 5, with a focus on the different empirical questions being addressed in the three analyses. This is followed by more general conclusions about the effect of social network structure, especially as it interacts with occupation and sex, in Raleigh’s dialect contact setting. The chapter then turns to an appraisal of the current state of knowledge about how linguistic variables move through social networks, and the models that sociolinguists have proposed for the interrelated effects of social network and economic characteristics. Finally, three paths toward progress in sociolinguistic network analysis are proposed: integrating ego network data with replicable data about the community’s network structure; collecting both kinds of network data in small communities, where representative samples are potentially realistic even given the size constraints on sociolinguistic samples; and harnessing insights from ongoing computational modeling research.
