Relationality in sociolinguistics: A dialogue with linguistic ethnography.

This paper selects as its focus the study of relationality in sociolinguistics. Through an emphasis on social relations as these emerge in discursive and communicative praxis I propose a critical revising of some more traditional, positivistic understandings of sociolinguistic research that enshrine a firm divide between a researching subject and an object of this research. This is followed by a relational analysis of empirical data from the Greek Albanian communities of modern Greece. Many threads of my discussion of relationality in sociolinguistics dovetail with the newly emerging field of Linguistic Ethnography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]