ABSTRACT
Scholars involved in the study of language and society have engaged in important and wide-ranging international debates about the nature of the relationship between sociology and linguistics in general. The day-to-day activities of research in sociology, in sociolinguistics, and at the intersection of the two disciplines, are of course dominated by practical issues of research method. To be sure, there is much additional information on 'variable operationalizations' that could ideally be taken into account in empirical studies and which tends to be brushed over in many variationist sociolinguistic approaches. William Labov argued that, despite the emergence of modern sociolinguistics, there remained a 'chasm' separating sociology and linguistics, which contrasted with the proximity or 'intimate relations' between anthropology and linguistics. Narratives of major social change are prominent within the intersection of sociological and variationist sociolinguistic studies of contemporary France.
