In this chapter, we look at sociolinguistic aspects of globalization. The sociolinguistic turn entailed a focus on variation, which became more intricate as social barriers shifted. Recent changes have intensified such trends, and today language variation is no longer seen as static, in a socially stratified and rather rigid system. Rather, it represents a negotiated system and a fluid form of identity construction characterized by ever-widening social networks in an increasingly digital world. We look at superdiversity in the postmodern world and effects of mobility on sociolinguistic repertoires, present theoretical and methodological issues, both geopolitically and geoculturally, and introduce the World Language System, which orders the world’s languages into different layers according to criteria such as usage, function and speaker numbers. Finally, we look at winners and losers of language and globalization (countries, companies and individuals) so as to assess general sociolinguistic trends in a postmodern world.

We will look at attitudes and value judgments which speakers and communities have about English dialects and discuss their social relevance of language in general. We will see that language is not only a means to share information but an essential part of social life which helps us organize ourselves and define our identity. There are different levels of usage (regional, social, ethnic, individual) and that variation has regional, social and individual dimensions. We start with a short discussion of general attitudes about language varieties, look at social prejudice based on language usage, find out why some varieties are stigmatized whereas others have high prestige and get a first glance of perceptions about standard and non-standardized varieties. Looking at examples from English around the world, we take a look at perceptual dialectology to demonstrate how views toward dialects affect our ives – not forgetting their negative side effects.

In this chapter explore language usage and interaction in general and discuss the overlap of sociolinguistics with the fields of pragmatics and discourse analysis. We will investigate the conventional patterns used by speakers when they construct, participate in and evaluate discourse at large. The concept of face is an important one here, namely the self-image of speakers that they wish to maintain and protect via the sociolinguistic resources available to them: speech events in the form of narratives, telephone conversations, weblogs, university lectures, etc. Context effects on sociolinguistic interaction are discussed with examples of turn-taking, power, solidarity and cross-cultural communication, and also with a focus on social hierarchies and language practices in the workplace. We conclude with a discussion of crossing and translanguaging in multilingual contexts.