ABSTRACT
The coherence of macro-lects (language varieties) is complicated by the presence of internal micro-lects (performances of social identities by subgroups of the speech community), and both macro and micro can be affected by broad social changes. One approach to integrating the two perspectives is the Index of Similarity (IoS), explored here through a discussion of gender and sexuality in Auckland, New Zealand. A corpus of interviews straddling a period of social change in New Zealand provides data comparing vowel spaces across two age cohorts and multiple gendered identities, and shows broad correlations between linguistic alignments and the social landscape in the speech community. The methodologically simple IoS provides an overview of the relationship between micro-lectal identity categories and the macro-lectal variety across the vowel system as a whole, and identifies groups that pattern in socially meaningful ways. Although not a tool for fine-grained analysis of individual variables, the IoS provides a zoomed-out snapshot of the vowel system as a whole, and the gendered categories that comprise the speech community.
