ABSTRACT
Urban sociolinguistics, and particularly variationist sociolinguistics, attempts to develop rules, models and typologies; it has turned out to be a rather challenging task due to the number and types of factors and data that need to be investigated (Owens 2005a). The link between social and linguistic processes is particularly complex. The same phenomenon (for example, migration and settlement in a given city) can produce very different linguistic outcomes depending on the historical and social settings. To what extent do the rules observed in industrialized and post-industrialized Western cities, and the socioeconomic categories developed in these countries, apply to other parts of the world? Like any other social science, urban sociolinguistics balances universalism and localism, generalization and particularism. In this respect, investigating non-Western urban settings might help to identify both universal trends and more specific local issues.
