ABSTRACT
At this point, we begin to examine some of the factors that are strongly associated with what is called variationist sociolinguistics. In this chapter, we will look at how variation plays an important role in language change. The evidence for this can be seen in what are known as real time studies (because they involve comparing the way people talk at one point in time with the way they talk a decade, or a generation, or a hundred years later). We will also see how sociolinguists have found ways of getting around the problem of having limited access to historical records, by looking at changes in apparent time. This notion of time is a more abstract one; as we will see it involves abstracting from the way speakers of different ages talk at a single point in time.
