Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book honors Shana Poplack in bringing together contributions from leading scholars in language variation and change. It demonstrates how variationist methodology can be applied to the study of linguistic structures and processes. In modern societies, linguistic divergence inevitably emerges based on age, sex, ethnicity, economic class, or neighborhood. Language mavens, mainly educators, journalists, and other media professionals, take a psychologizing approach to the most popular vernaculars, seeing errors, bad habits, logical problems, and unpleasant aesthetics. In contrast, Shana's vision, in part instinctive, and in part implicit in her training with Labov, of the confrontation of elite varieties of a language with minority or popular varieties is that it is a purely ideological repression of the non-elite. The recent turn to corpora and statistics in linguistics is as yet largely union-formed by the cumulative advances in variationist sociolinguistics.