ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores some of the key terms and concepts for studying variation related to both users and uses, as well as to illustrates and discusses particular varieties of English. Halliday describes three interrelated functions of language: the ideational function of representing experience; the interpersonal function of expressing the relations between, and the attitudes of, the people interacting; and the textual function of making words and sentences into coherent text. Sociolinguists often make use of the term speech community to describe a group of speakers who share the same language varieties or speech repertoires. On a basic level, all speakers of English belong to an English speech community, but a definition as broad as this is obviously not very useful to us in studying variation within English, since it is too all-encompassing and assumes that English is used uniformly around the globe.
