This volume presents a collection of recent work in the area of sociolinguistics. This selection of papers represents the latest research in the field, offering papers that present and analyze new data and papers that synthesize known theories and analyze old data in order to arrive at a fresh look at how social and linguistic behavior interact. The papers in this volume are culled from those presented at "New Ways of Analyzing Variation" at Stanford University, October 1994, and extend the area traditionally covered by variation studies to include work on discourse analysis, style and register, codeswitching, and other related topics.