ABSTRACT
It is an everyday observation that young people do not speak like their parents, let alone their grandparents. Where we come from, what we do for a living and the company we keep may also be related to the way we speak. Northerners usually differ from southerners, TV announcers and lawyers rarely sound like dockers or farmers, nor do people use quite the same language when speaking in public and chatting to their friends. All these aspects of linguistic variability are of interest to sociolinguists as they set out to study how language can vary in patterned ways when it is used by individuals and groups of people in various social situations for different communicative purposes. In due course, this variation may lead to language change. It is the processes of language change that constitute the subject matter of this book.
