Investigating elusive stylistic variation in a tight-knit language community

Ever since Labov's pioneering work in New York City in the 1960s (e.g., Labov, 1972), initial sociolinguistic surveys of language communities have taken into account the same social factors as predictors of linguistic variation: age, sex (or gender), social class, and speech style. This set-up works inasmuch as the communities are broadly similar to the USA; however, different community structures pose different challenges to what has become the de facto standard in sociolinguistics (Smakman & Heinrich, 2015). The Faroe Islands present such a different community structure: a small and tight-knit language community with a weak but complicated sense of a standard spoken language (Hagström, 2005; Jacobsen, 2011). Rather than a traditional interpretation of social class, Jacobsen (2008) argued that Faroese sociolinguistics benefits from investigating the influence of various 'life styles' on language behaviour. In this paper, I use recent sociolinguistic work on Faroese to show that the traditional concepts of speech style as 'attention to speech' (Labov, 2001) or 'audience design' (Bell, 2001) do not work very well either, and suggest alternative ways of investigating stylistic variation in a tight-knit language community.