Based on discussions held at two different events—a sociolinguistic symposium in Auckland in 2018 and a round table at the University of Copenhagen in 2019—this volume comprises studies that explore the notion of norms related to language use by means of different theoretical and methodological approaches within sociolinguistics and related disciplines.
The introduction, by the editors of the book, offers an overview of the way the notion of norms has been used in sociolinguistics, unpacks some assumptions relied upon, presents how the concept of norms is approached in this volume, and briefly describes the articles that compose the book. Chapter 2, by Peter Harder, offers a reflection about conceptual and practical distinctions between ‘evaluative’ and ‘operational’ norms. By discussing their implications for emergent communities with examples, including some from the current volume, he points out that such communities, when lacking a normative steady state for social interaction, achieve a sense of togetherness by making use of ‘construct resources’. That is, by using their ideological postulates about language variation and social meaning, communities benefit from pursuing the aims that bring their members together.
Chapters 3, 4, 5, and 8 comprehend that norms are empirically materialized in discursive and interactional practices as shared understandings through which social members negotiate meaning. While chapters 3 (by Spencer Hazel & Dorte Lønsmann) and 4 (by Irina Piippo) focus on investigations from educational settings, chapter 5 (by Kraft & Mortensen) analyses interactions from a transient community, and chapter 8 (by Meredith Marra, Janet Holmes, & Bernadette Vine) compares interactions in two different communities of practice: organisational team meetings and service encounters. One example of these shared understandings can be seen in the way Piippo shows, by investigating interactions at an immigrant integration training program, that the Finnish teaching register under scrutiny is not only constituted by the use of vocabulary and syntax. Instead, it involves a range of multimodal resources through which participants demonstrate their understandings.
Chapters 6 (by Marie-Luise Pitzl) and 7 (by Anne Fabricius) explore the association between change and variation in language. While the former explores linguistic norms from the perspective of creativity by analysing interactions from a long speech event among European exchange students, the latter focuses on the concept of norms within variationist sociolinguistics by quantitatively investigating the realization of prevocalic /r/ as a production norm over time, and, from a contemporary perspective, qualitatively illustrating the trilled/tapped /r/'s current ambiguous status.
In the last chapter of this volume, Nikolas Coupland recalls the requirement for citizens in the United Kingdom to wear face coverings as a measure to the Covid-19 pandemic, and unpacks the multi-layered character of social norms by presenting some conceptual components that encompass its scope (normative field, authorship, normative valency, etc.). As an accurate choice for a closing article, Coupland also explores the preceding chapters from this volume by reflecting on their reflexive dimension of normativity when dealing with linguistic norms.
Grounded on studies from different geographic contexts, this volume as a whole provides relevant and innovative studies in terms of the multi-layered character of norms, approaching it empirically by means of different perspectives within sociolinguistics.
