Pronunciation and the rich points of culture

At the time when sociolinguistics was Labovian studies of social and stylistic stratification (Labov 1966), there was an unbroken chain of mutual influence from descriptive phonetics through dialectology to mainstream sociolinguistics. ¹ Given Labov’s explicit favouring of phonological as opposed to syntactic, lexical or discourse variation in quantitative studies –on the practical grounds that phonetic variants were at least frequent and often relatively easy to code, plus the theoretical grounds that they allow us to meet the requirement of sameness needed in variationist research (Lavandera 1978; Coupland 1983) – modern sociolinguistics was founded on the already rich analyses of geographically and socially varying phonetic forms and phonological systems (Wells 1982). And it was largely in phonological terms that researchers developed theories about how linguistic systems were organised in the competences of individuals and communities, and about how these changed over time.