ABSTRACT
The United States hosts a wide variety of sociolinguistic enterprises. From regional and social studies of dialect variation to perceptual laboratory experiments, many possible ways to explore the various levels of interaction between language and society have been enacted in the US. Vowel shifts, such as the Northern Cities Shift and the Southern Shift, have been some of the most frequent studies. Both African American Language and Latinx varieties have also been major interests. With developments in sociolinguistics, many researchers have focused on micro-scale studies of communities of practice, personae, and intra-speaker variation. The examination of covariation has also been a recent trend in the US. This chapter takes up both the sociolinguistics of language and the sociolinguistics of society. The breadth of research topics and research methods in this chapter illustrates the plethora of sociolinguistic subfields in the US. From acoustic phonetics to discourse analysis, US sociolinguists employ the entire repertoire of modern linguistic methodology to examine varieties of English, Spanish, American Sign Language, and other languages.
