It is no overstatement to say that Pierre Bourdieu is one the most influential social-scientific thinkers of the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. Terms designed by him – ‘habitus,’ ‘field,’ ‘symbolic violence’ and so forth – have become part of the core vocabulary of anthropology, sociology, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, cultural studies and media studies. Three perhaps less widely understood aspects of his work in the field of language (cfr. Language and Symbolic Power, 1991), that are of direct relevance to contemporary theorizing in the field of language in society, merit elaborate discussion, especially: (i) Bourdieu’s theoretical investment in a post-orthodox ‘new left’ Marxism and his deep interest in the ethnographic stance developed in American symbolic interactionism; (ii) his view of research methodology, in particular his ethnographic bias and the way in which that bias led to a continuous ‘loop’ of ethnography and quantification; (iii) the way in which, throughout his oeuvre, Bourdieu sought to develop ‘nexus concepts’ such as habitus, where ‘micro-’ and ‘macro-’ features coincide. All three aspects may be considered useful for addressing the phenomenology of contemporary social change and the role of language therein. In his book “Language and Symbolic Power", Bourdieu’s most influential intervention on language, he subscribes to the fundamentally dynamic, practice-based and ‘emic’ approach to communication developed by the likes of Goffman, Cicourel and Garfinkel; but he couches it into a broader historical frame (making his approach effectively Bakhtinian, one could say) and designs his analysis of language in society through the theoretical vocabulary developed in “The Logic of Practice (1990)”. Thus, social interaction articulates socio-historically configured ‘positions’ from whence people speak; these positions are defined by a ‘market’ of symbolic capital in which resources are circulated and unevenly distributed, ensuring, for instance, that a ‘high’ Parisian accent will be perceived as superior vis-à-vis a ‘low’ upcountry accent. Thus, in any social field, distinctions will emerge between ‘legitimate’ language (the ‘norm,’ one could say) and deviant forms of language. His blending of an ethnographically inflected ontology with a tendency to aim for larger, historically configured patterns of social structure, all of this often pitted against classical structuralist assumptions, yielded a remarkable research procedure in much of Bourdieu’s work. Bourdieu theorizes how he himself became part of the object: the objectification of subjectivity. This is also the point where he makes the shift from anthropology (or ethnology) to sociology. He invariably started from ethnographic engagement in the field, where the confrontation of two social-historically grounded forms of embodied subjectivity (habituses) provided the hypotheses to be statistically tested. The loop in which ethnographic material was tested statistically and then brought into a new ethnographic round of inquiry removed the synchronic bias of Levi-Straussian structuralism and made Bourdieu’s object dynamic. His methodology, consequently, was one that addressed change rather than stasis. Bourdieu moves from ethnographic generalization to an empirical (ethnographic) generalization. A concept such as habitus is an attempt at ‘macro’ generalization at the level of what we would call ‘micro’ practices; let us call it a ‘nexus concept’ in which different scale-levels of social behavior are shown to be dialectically connected. What contemporary scholars of language and society can take from Bourdieu’s work is the fundamental insight that language can be approached from the viewpoint of society, as an extraordinarily sensitive index of social relationships, processes and developments.