ABSTRACT
This chapter describes current sociolinguistic research on British English. Its focus is on the state of the art of studies that analyse current sociolinguistic features of British English and on research that investigates British English from a sociolinguistic perspective. These studies explore the complex relationship between language usage and social, geographical, situational, attitudinal and relational variables and new emerging phenomena resulting from technological innovation, the influence of social media or big data and, methodologically, the impact of corpus linguistics. Drawing on Eckert’s (2012) “third wave” of variationist research, the chapter ends with a brief (theoretical and practical) discussion of a fresh sociolinguistic “gaze” (Britain, 2017b) that is necessary in order to capture everyday sociolinguistic practices in a mediatised, mobile and global world.
