ABSTRACT
The previous chapter dealt with the sociolinguistic study of variation in geographical space and in cyberspace. Starting with studies such as the one by Labov (mentioned several times already), a primary target of sociolinguistic investigation has been also to study variation in social spaces through research on how human interaction unfolds in specic ways in such spaces. The variant forms of speech are called social dialects, extending the traditional geographical notion of dialect to encompass variation in the social domain. They are now also commonly called sociolects.
