ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the sociophonetic study of sound change, focusing especially on the work of William Labov and his colleagues. After situating the sociolinguistic approach to sound change in relation to the traditional historical linguistic approach, the chapter examines the apparent-time method of studying sound change in progress; the application of acoustic phonetics to the study of vowel shifts and mergers (culminating in the Atlas of North American English); and the use of sociophonetic methods to address theoretical questions relating to the lexical, social, and geographic diffusion of sound change. It concludes by reviewing a case study involving the author’s own use of an archive of film and television speech to study sound change over eight decades of real time, which can be compared with previous apparent-time analyses.
