Studying register variation

To this point in the book we have focused on the description of language characteristics, whether lexical, grammatical, or discourse features. However, researchers often have research questions relating to the description of “registers” rather than individual linguistic features. The term “register” is used here as a cover term for varieties defined by their situational characteristics. Some registers can be very specific, such as novels written by Jane Austen, or Methods sections in biology research articles. Other registers are more general, such as conversation or student essays.

Registers should be distinguished from “dialects.” Registers are defined according to their situations of use (considering their purpose, topic, setting, interactiveness, mode, etc.). In contrast, dialects are defined by their association with different speaker groups (e.g., speakers living in a particular region or speakers belonging to a particular social group). In this chapter we focus on the description of registers; subsequent chapters in this section also include the study of dialect differences (e.g., essays written by L1-Navajo students versus L1-English students in Chapter 7).

Control of a range of registers is crucially important for any competent speaker of a language. It is probably accurate to say that no one controls only a single register; rather, during the course of any day, we all speak and write a wide range of registers.