Enregisterment: How linguistic items become linked with ways of speaking

A key question for sociolinguistics is how communicative signs and sets of signs come to index styles, identities, activities, genres, dialects, and other social and communicative practices. The concept of “enregisterment,” borrowed from linguistic anthropologists in the Piercian semiotic tradition, provides a useful heuristic for thinking about this process. This article offers a definition of enregisterment and considers each of its facets in turn. Using examples from research conducted in a U.S. city, the article answers these questions: What sorts of forms, linguistic and other, can become indexically linked with a way of speaking? What are the social and functional categories with which ways of speaking can be associated? What are the agents of enregisterment; what makes it happen? What ideological schemas can make it make sense to enregister a form in a particular way? And finally, under what interactional and historical conditions does the enregisterment of particular ways of speaking tend to occur?