This special issue of the Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique is devoted to the intriguing notion of représentation linguistique, an idea that developed in French (socio-)linguistics some ten years ago (cf. Jodelet 1993), following earlier work by Anne-Marie Houdebine (1982).

In their preface, Philippe Hambye and Anne Catherine Simon discuss one of the major tenets of this approach, namely the idea that représentation linguistique, in addition to being concerned with how language is represented in the human mind — and thus very much in line with the cognitive turn of linguistics — also implies that as a cognitive entity, language has no self-contained status in the sense of post-structualist, generative grammar. Rather, the way in which we language users look upon language is always socially contextualised. Whatever we know, in the largest sense of the word, about language and varieties of language is inextricably linked to the situations and social groups, the speakers and geographical regions, the linguistic genres and social styles that constitute it. Linguistic representations, understood as everyday knowledge of language, are therefore normatively organised. They have to do with how someone of a certain type (incumbent to a certain social category) is supposed to, or can be expected to speak, given certain typified circumstances, and what it means for him or her to speak in this way.