The work presented in the following pages is a linguistic analysis of one speech community. Like any linguistic analysis, it is concerned with a system of contrastive relations, the code by which speakers communicate with one another. In this particular community, New York City, the system of the individual speaker appears to be less coherent than that of the speech community as a whole. The isolated idiolect of the individual New Yorker shows so much unaccountable variation that it has been described as a case of massive “free variation.” But when this individual speech pattern is studied in the larger context of the speech community, it is seen as an element in a highly systematic of social and stylistic stratification. It has therefore been necessary to extend the study of linguistic structure to include continuous social and stylistic variation, and unconscious subjective reactions to the variables concerned – areas that have previously been considered inaccessible to formal linguistic analysis.

In the past few years, there has been considerable programmatic discussion of sociolinguistics at various meetings and symposia. If this term refers to the use of data from the speech community to solve problems of linguistic theory, then I would agree that it applies to the research described here. But sociolinguistics is more frequently used to suggest a new interdisciplinary field – the comprehensive description of the relations of language and society. This seems to me an unfortunate notion, foreshadowing a long series of purely descriptive studies with little bearing on the central theoretical problems of linguistics or of sociology.