Abstract The question of when and how American English emerged as a distinct variety of English has recently been addressed again within more general discussions of the emergence and evolution of new varieties of English ( Schneider 2007 ; Kretzschmar 2014 , 2015 ). I argue in this chapter that these discussions would benefit from a clear and consistent differentiation between the emergence of varieties as discourse constructs (‘discursive varieties’) and as distinct structural systems (‘structural varieties’). I propose using the theoretical framework of ‘enregisterment’ ( Agha 2003 , 2007 ) to investigate the discursive dimension and I show how enregisterment processes can be studied systematically by providing a case study of metadiscursive activities linking five linguistic forms to stereotypic indexical values in nineteenth-century U.S. newspaper articles.
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