What do scholars of language and culture mean when we say “awareness”? In this talk, I review different approaches to awareness from the fields of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. There is now widespread agreement that social information is embedded in grammar, and that our understanding of links between language and social categories can dictate the way that we recognize and produce language. These processes hold material power over the world and how our positions in it are constructed. However, we lack a detailed understanding of how different “levels” or qualities of awareness are related. I argue that signs produced and interpreted in interaction are key to the construction of sociolinguistic awareness, and hence social and linguistic meaning. Theorizing these relationships is key to advancing research on the links between language and social categorization, and provides a window on the ways that racial and ethnic discrimination function through cognitive linguistic processes.