ABSTRACT
The information in this description is derived from a longitudinal project on the sociophonetic variation of a group of Cardiff informants whose linguistic development is being traced over a period beginning in 1976. 1 So far four corpora of material have been assembled of which three have been utilised for this survey. Recordings were made of 80 primary schoolchildren (aged 9-11) in 1976. In 1981 it was possible to trace 75 of these. In 1990, 54 of the informants were tracked down and recorded together with a new sample of approximately 70 Cardiff children of primary school age (not used for this study). It is hoped to obtain a further set of data in 2001. Where language change is noted, this refers not only to a comparison of the first and subsequent recording sessions but also to observations made of a small group of Cardiff speakers of the older generation (65 plus).2
