Sociolinguistic scales in retrospect

Abstract

In this commentary, I offer a review of how sociolinguistic scales featured in the development of my own work over the past decade. Scales, I explain, were always indispensable as an imaginative concept allowing a reimagination of sociolinguistic facts, but the concept of scales was never sufficient to adequately address this reimagined reality. I illustrate this point by means of an account of how scales helped me address three fundamental problems: the problem of meaning, that of situatedness, and that of indexicality.