ABSTRACT
It goes without saying that language change in real time can best be traced by using corpora that cover a long timespan. In a way, it is a paradox that we have learnt a great deal about language change from sociolinguists, who have not had access to historical data. The first chapters of Labov (1994) raise many issues concerning the character of historical linguistics and, nevertheless, the time depth in the real-time replications in that book hardly exceeds 20 years, a period which in our research is regarded as the basic unit of contemporaneous writing. Differences like this are indicative of the divergent perspectives between the sociolinguistic research into the present-day spoken idiom and the study of past language forms. The latter inevitably focuses on general trends and large-scale developments instead of minute details. However, this does not exclude micro-level observations on the linguistic behaviour of individuals who lived long ago.
