ABSTRACT

The inherent variability of language and the social and linguistic interpretations it makes possible form the basis of the discipline of sociolinguistics. The social sciences provide the descriptive categories that have been found to be important in the structure of society and that play important roles in the social distribution of wealth, education, power, and influence. The basic task of linguists of all kinds is to discover patterns in the linguistic data, and when it is change that is focused on, the patterns are subtle and can only be seen in the gradual increase over time in the use of the incoming sound or morphosyntactic feature. It is not a matter of the presence or absence of some linguistic feature, nor is it a case of observing a change that has been completed like the Great Vowel Shift in English. For a number of reasons, phonological change is of primary importance to variationist sociolinguists.