Communities of practice has emerged as an alternative to other current sociolinguistic models such as speech communities and social networks, particularly in the area of language and gender. The valorization of non‐linguistic behaviours as adding further explanatory power to sociolinguistic models is timely: it has often been implicit in linguistic study (through ethnography) but rarely been given recognition. However, the types of self‐constituting communities of interest to sociolinguists are not the same as the communities of learning studied by Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998). If this construct is to be useful to sociolinguists, then the mechanisms by which it models access, gate‐keeping and its internal hierarchy need development. Using Eckert's (2000) Belten High data, and other work on adolescent talk, it is argued that gaining legitimate peripheral participation is a matter of sanction from within the hierarchy. Individuals do not have open access to communities based solely on their desire to be part of that community and to take part in its practices. While practices may define the community, the community determines who has access to that practice.
A small corpus of student e-mail requests to academic staff in a British and an Australian university was collected in order to investigate the cross-cultural nature of Englishes in these requesting events. The notions of ACCOUNT and BUT-JUSTIFICATION, together with the concepts of EQUITY and EQUILIBRIUM are used to explicate the distribution of various features associated with these requests. Results indicate that the British data orient to deferential DEPENDENCE whereas the Australian data exhibit interdependent EGALITARIANISM. Finally, the process of our analysis brings to light the fact that we ought to refine Heider's (1958) theory of OBLIGATION and this, we do. The overall claims of this paper are that the situated nature of student e-mail requests can have a great bearing on the discursive construction of student identities, that this has a bearing on how things get done, and that how things get done in different varieties of English merits further investigation.
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