ABSTRACT
Few sociolinguistic studies can claim to have taken into account all the various social factors that may affect human language behaviour. Labov’s (2001: 84) list of minimum requirements includes the following speaker variables: gender, age, ethnicity, race, social class, urban/rural status and position in social networks. The list could easily be extended, as has been done in recent work on gender, by focusing on intragroup variability and considering, for instance, the Communities of Practice in which social roles are enacted (Bergvall 1999).
