My title comes from two sources, one of which I assume is rather more familiar to an anthropological audience than the other. The familiar one is Durkheim's (1983) The Division of Labor in Society. The other is Hilary Putnam's discussion of a "division of linguistic labor" (in "The Meaning of 'Meaning,'" 1975:227). Of course, a notion of the "organization of diversity" in language (Hymes 1964), a diversity that relates to the organization of a social system, is fundamental to sociolinguistics and the ethnography of speaking, though deriving from a partly different intellectual tradition (see Wallace 1961). But Putnam's paper suggested to me that this diversity can be found in more aspects of linguistic structure than sociolinguists usually consider; and it spurred me to think a bit differently and more systematically about the links between linguistic and socioeconomic realms. (I shall return to Putnam a bit later.)

What I want to do in this paper is to summarize and order some views concerning relations between a verbal economy (so to speak) and a more material economy, and to try to lay out the range of possibilities as to what those relations can be--that is, to attempt a typology of sociolinguistic divisions of labor. What distinguishes my types are (a) what kind of diversity they envision on the linguistic plane; and (b) whether they see language as related to social divisions of labor constitutively or indexically. These views, or types, are not mutually exclusive, but differences in focus.

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