First Discussion

[Guild of English Students]

In linguistics, a register is a variety of a language used for a
particular purpose or in a particular social setting.

As with other types of language variation, there tends to be a
spectrum of registers rather than a discrete set of obviously distinct
varieties — there is a countless number of registers we could
identify, with no clear boundaries. Discourse categorisation is a
complex problem, and even in the general definition of "register"
given above (language variation defined by use not user), there are
cases where other kinds of language variation, such as regional or age
dialect, overlap. As a result of this complexity, there is far from
consensus about the meanings of terms like "register", "field" or
"tenor"; different writers' definitions of these terms are often in
direct contradiction of each other. Additional terms such as diatype,
genre, text types, style, acrolect, mesolect and basilect among many
others may be used to cover the same or similar ground. Some prefer to
restrict the domain of the term "register" to a specific vocabulary
(Wardhaugh, 1986) (which one might commonly call jargon), while others
argue against the use of the term altogether. These various approaches
with their own "register" or set of terms and meanings fall under
disciplines such as sociolinguistics, stylistics, pragmatics or
systemic functional grammar.

The term register was first used by the linguist Thomas Bertram Reid
in 1956, and brought into general currency in the 1960s by a group of
linguists who wanted to distinguish between variations in language
according to the user (defined by variables such as social background,
geography, sex and age), and variations according to use, "in the
sense that each speaker has a range of varieties and choices between
them at different times" (Halliday et al., 1964).