The term "Regional Standard English" should refer to any kind of English spoken by educated individuals in a particular region. Vernacular is spoken by individuals with little education. Sociolinguistics as a field embraces ethnography of communication, social coding, societal analysis, social-psychological analysis and anthropoloty, all of which avenues of research are pursued by noted linguistic theorists. These strands may be unified into a "pandialectical model of sociolinguistic research." Early work in the field isolated vernaculars, identified patterns of language choices, and constructed rules governing variability. Variation within a language or between languages can be understood as a continuum within which a speaker moves and chooses. Notions of language restrictiveness and elaborateness were seen to be independent of intellectual capacity. Research into southwest English must consider Mexican-American English, Spanish, and bilingualism. Research should study sociolinguistic perspectives investigated elsewhere and identify pandialectical elements that may be applied to the southwest to construct a pandialectical model to trigger research. Issues to be examined include: (1) identification of vernaculars, (2) the nature of stylistic shifting, (3) description of speech communities, (4) description of variability features through variable rules, and (5) the presence of cross-cultural biases. (CHK)