Register (Sociolinguistics)

In sociolinguistics, a register is a variety of language used for a particular purpose or particular communicative situation. The cited article gives the example of an English speaker who is more likely to follow prescriptive norms for formal usage when speaking officially or in a public setting than in a casual one, choosing words such as father rather than dad. It explains that there tends to be a spectrum of registers rather than a discrete set of distinct varieties, that scholarly consensus has not been reached on the definitions of terms such as register, field or tenor, and that other terms such as style, sociolect and ethnolect may be used to cover similar ground. Varieties the atlas records as registers or style varieties are grouped under this entry.