This study takes an ethnolexicographic approach (Silverstein, 2006) to present a glossary of the skateboarding subculture derived from sociolinguistic interviews conducted with 11 skaters. This study also uses this ethnolexicography to compare sociolinguistic interviews with four skaters, two conducted by a skater and two by a non-skater, and investigates the relationship between skater identity and lexical accommodation (Giles & Ogay, 2007) in the sociolinguistic interview.The sociolinguistic interview has been shown to be a fruitful site for the investigation of participants' aims (Schiffrin, 1994). The effects of the interviewer's in- or out-group status, as well as familiarity with an interviewer have been shown to effect an interviewee's linguistic performance (Cukor- Avila & Bailey, 2001; Rickford & McNair-Knox, 1994). Given what we know about skaters' proclivity for resistance to authority and the centrality of nonconformity and an insider mentality to skaters' authenticity (Beal & Weidman, 2003; Borden, 2019; Dupont, 2014), the sociolinguistic interview, as a form of "institutional interview" (Schiffrin, 1994, p. 162), serves as a particularly intriguing setting in which to examine skaters' linguistic performances of identity.In addition to presenting the first ethnographically-oriented analysis of the language of the skateboarding community, this dissertation demonstrates the inextricable relationship between linguistic knowledge and cultural knowledge, and the centrality of this knowledge to skater authenticity. Furthermore, I demonstrate that skaters' willingness to use language which is meaningful to an out-group audience is influenced less by the group identity of the interviewer, and more upon the degree to which the interviewee's identity as skater is central. Specifically, whether or not the interviewer was a skater or non-skater, the more established skaters made an overt effort "to describe it [skateboarding terms] to a non-skater." On the other hand, the skaters whose authenticity was less established made no effort to accommodate either to a non-skater interviewer or to a potential future non-skater audience who may listen to the interview
