Sociolinguistic Individuality in a Remnant Dialect Community

This article argues that the recognition of individual variation is helpful for understanding sociolinguistic variables. While past researchers have argued that variables are comprehensible only if each individual in a social group uses variables at the same frequency as all other individuals, the author shows that this conception of the variable ignores crucial information in the social study of language: that social groups are composed of people with widely different interests and ideas of “self.” Data from the speech of fourteen young, African American residents of a rural community on the North Carolina coast are presented. The author demonstrates that there is considerable evidence for the existence of individual variation in speech, given that this variation is constrained by the linguistic structure used by the surrounding speech community. The sociolinguistic variable is thus a set of possibilities in speech rather than a statistical whole that reflects exactly its parts.