1 Developing a sociocultural orientation to variation in language Rémi A. van Compernolle The Pennsylvania State University Article to appear in Language and Communication Abstract This article aims to develop a sociocultural orientation to variation in language. It engages with Eckert‘s recent reconceptualization of variationist sociolinguistic theory as an enterprise that privileges social meaning and communicative activity over language structure. Four concepts are presented. (1) Language structure is emergent and, therefore, structural regularity and variation arises from more frequent ways of using language. (2) Language and activity types are mutually contingent so that language recognized as allowable is determined by the activity in progress and, recursively, activities are recognized by the actions that constitute them. (3) Meaning is contingent upon the dialectics of micro- social and macro-social frames. (4) Speakers make use of collaboratively constructed conventions to design their own meanings in concrete communicative activity. 1. Introduction In this article, I present a sociocultural orientation to variation in language, and in so doing, engage with Penelope Eckert‘s recent writings on ‗third wave‘ variationist theory (Eckert 2005, 2008). Although nearly five decades of Labovian-inspired variationist sociolinguistic research (Labov 1972, 1994, 2001) has produced a robust understanding of the ‗orderly heterogeneity‘ of language (Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog 1968: 100), Eckert argues that it has been principally concerned with formal aspects of the linguistic system (i.e., distribution of forms). The meanings, identities, and ideologies created by individuals using linguistic variants in concrete, contextualized communicative activity have been largely ignored. At the same time, the concept of the linguistic variable implies that the existence of two or more ways of saying the same thing is a prerequisite for variation in communicative activity. However, the argument I want to make is that a generative, inside-the-head orientation to language (cf. variable rules) is incommensurable with the dialectics of sociolinguistic phenomena (Silverstein 2003) and Eckert‘s conception of the indexical field. An emergentist perspective on language (Hopper 1987, 1998; Tomasello 2003) offers an alternative view of variation in line with the third wave enterprise. Within this perspective, variation in language does not entail the divergence from an idealized or