Speakers use grammatical and phonological patterns to symbolize social meanings such as

intimacy or distance, solidarity or status

The following sentences show parts of grammar which are particularly prone to variation
according to region and social status.

a) Pronoun system: “They gave we a bottle of whisky”

b) Verb morphology: “He went to the hospital but he was never tret. (treated)”
c) Modal auxiliary verb system: “He wouldn’t could’ve worked even if you had asked him”
(wouldn’t have been able to)

One northern Irish postgraduate student was observed to address a class of undergraduates as
“you” for the entire duration of a fifty minute seminar, switching to “yous” as he left the room
following the formal wind-up of the class.

In some parts of England (South Yorkshire and Derbyshire), the old form “thee” is still used,
apparently to mark social values such as solidarity and intimacy.

How can native speakers with different dialect systems understand each other? There were 2
assumptions which were thought to solve the problem: the first one was that syntactic differences
between dialects were relatively trivial and the second that context generally assists in resolving
difficulties.

According to studies neither of these were true. But conversation analysts emphasize the
collaborative negotiation of understanding by speakers, who accept ambiguity and vagueness on
the assumption that they will eventually together evolve an understanding which is good enough
for current communicative purposes.

The social values associated with variation between standard and non-standard forms are most
clearly evident in the level of phonology. Sociolinguists have described the distribution of
particular pronunciations throughout a population in terms of such social factors as age , ethnicity,
sex, and social class of speaker.

Patterns of variation in pronunciation are subject to change. Variants which at a particular point in
time are associated with low status groups may in their turn become preferred by higher status
groups.

Several investigators such as Macaulay (1977), Romaine(1975) and Trudgill(1974) have associated
glottal or glottalized realizations of /t/ with urban working-class speech in different British cities.
Such realizations are quite overtly and strongly stigmatized.
Two issues are raised by sociolinguistically variable data which are of particular importance to
second language learning. The first is the need for learners to cue themselves in to the
sociocultural context which is encoded by these patterns of variation, to be aware of them, and try
to interpret them. This seems to be one aspect of a larger listening and understanding task.

Sociolinguistics attempts to describe the nature of the sociocultural context and the social
meanings encoded by variants, and offers frameworks within which to describe and interpret
them.

The second important issue is standardization. The variety which we describe as standard English
has in fact been created historically by a process which has over the centuries reduced the amount
and kind of socially permitted variation. Language is inherently variable, and variant choices carry
clear social menanings.