The concept of language variation is central in sociolinguistics. The English language varies on individual, regional, national and global levels. Unfortunately, some people are unaware of various social and regional dialects, and different varieties of English in the world. Understanding variation within a language is important for every member of our community, and especially for those who receive a college education. Sociolinguistics investigates all these language variations.

The field of sociolinguistics is a relatively young but rather important branch of linguistics. It studies language in its social context, and analyzes the actual language use by different speakers in order to explain language variation and language change.

With respect to CMC, Murray discusses and draws conclusions on the following three areas:

1) New communicative situations that CMC enables and fosters –

Development of computer technology lead to creating of ‘a new site for discourse’, characteristics of which have not been conventionalized yet. CMC has discourse patterns that are similar to other types of discourse: it ‘exhibits the same gendered, hierarchical characteristics as do other registers’. CMC has a variety of communicative situations in text-based modes: e-mail, bulletin boards, computer conferences, IRC, listserves, chatrooms, WWW homepages, etc. Due to this variety, it has not developed into a specific genre. It is more writing-like than speech and more speech-like than writing.

The study of language and gender has developed in response to the emergence of feminism. Since there is no single variety of feminism, feminist theorists disagree on various issues.

Eckert (chapter 19) defines vernacular as the language that is the most closely associated with locally-based communities. The standard is the language that is used in ‘globalizing institutions’ which include schools and universities, business and government offices, and banks. Both variants are used by people to show connection/membership either with local or wider (more general) community.

From Lippi-Green’s point of view, standard language ideology is a ‘bias toward an abstracted, ideal­ized, non-varying spoken language that is imposed and maintained by dominant institutions’.