ABSTRACT
We started this volume by stating that the motivation of the editors for its creation was an awareness of a Western dominance in sociolinguistic theory making. All authors assembled in this book shared this view. They were aware that theoretical inconsistencies have to be bridged when applying mainstream sociolinguistics to the language communities in the regions of their expertise. As a result, the chapter authors call for more attention to be paid to distinct types of communities and societies. Several of the societies studied in this volume do not easily match the imagined societies popular in current sociolinguistic theory. Mainstream sociolinguistic theory is generally seen to be helpful, but it needs to be further refined in order to do justice both to the societies and languages studied in this volume, and to other societies. Different types of societies must give rise to different types of sociolinguistic study. What gives structure to a given society needs to be taken into account first before specific sociolinguistic theories are applied. Obversely, more emphasis and reflection may be paid to how society is seen to be structured in sociolinguistic theory before it is applied to new contexts and regions. The societies studied are in no way homogeneous and cannot always be studied by applying the well-known macro-categories of gender, social class or age. More diversified approaches therefore need to be applied towards this end. On a general plane, the results presented in this volume point to a necessity to
consider anew how the emic and the etic relate in sociolinguistic theory building and in the development of adequate research methods. The need to put considerations as to how etic and emic perspectives relate in the study of sociolinguistics has become a prominent topic in the study of politeness in the last decade. In place of the once impressively catch-all mainstream theories, we witness the emergence of what is in German referred to as Theorien mittlerer Reichweite (“mid-range theories”), as a result of enriching and adjusting mainstream theories for the study of distinct cultures of communication. This might well become a hallmark of a more consistently globalised study of sociolinguistics.
