This book examines how urban adolescents attending a non-mainstream learning centre in the UK use language and other semiotic practices to enact identities in their day-to-day lives. Combining variationist sociolinguistics and ethnographically-informed interactional sociolinguistics, this detailed and highly reflexive account provides rich descriptions and discussions of the linguistic processes at work in a previously underexplored research environment. In doing so, it reveals fresh insights into the changes taking place in urban British English, and into the difficulties of undertaking ethnographic, sociolinguistics, ethnography, and education; as well as providing a valuable resource for teachers and trainees--back cover.