ABSTRACT
Sociolinguistic competence encompasses how speaker characteristics influence patterns of language use, how identity is related to language choice, and how speakers vary language across settings. The acquisition of these communicative abilities in a second language allows us to make friends, demonstrate expertise, show empathy, and establish boundaries. Put simply, competent language users are not just grammatically accurate, they are situationally appropriate too. The current chapter describes the theoretical approaches that lend themselves to accounting for the development of situationally appropriate language use in a second language, highlighting research findings on this topic, effective methods for research on sociolinguistic (and communicative) competence, and pressing issues that remain in this field of inquiry.
