Bucholtz is a specialist in sociocultural linguistics, an interdisciplinary field that draws on linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and other approaches. In her research, she aims to take a highly interdisciplinary, richly contextualized, sociopolitically informed, and critically reflexive approach to language and its relationship to other semiotic systems. Her research program investigates four broad, interrelated issues: (1) the use of language in the production of the social self, especially among youth, from interactional stances to embodied socio-semiotic styles to larger ideology-saturated categories of race, gender, and their intersection; (2) the role of language, semiosis, and representation in the reproduction of power in a wide variety of institutions, from academia to the legal system to the media; (3) the centrality of the body and materiality in language; and (4) advancing social justice in and through linguistics, with a particular emphasis on community-centered collaborative research. Her ethnographic research focuses primarily on California and considers a wide range of languages and language varieties, including African American English; Chicanx Spanish, English, and translanguaging practices; Mixtec and other Mexican Indigenous languages in diaspora, and varieties of California English. 

Bucholtz is the author or coauthor of well over 100 articles and chapters as well as two books: White Kids: Language, Race, and Styles of Youth Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Talking College: Making Space for Black Language Practices in Higher Education (with Anne H. Charity Hudley and Christine Mallinson; Teachers College Press, 2022). She has edited or coedited 8 volumes, including most recently the open-access volumes Decolonizing Linguisticsand Inclusion in Linguistics (with Anne H. Charity Hudley and Christine Mallinson; Oxford University Press, 2024). Her work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and other funders.