2 Dennis R. Preston and Nancy Niedzielski
perhaps most tellingly, even a name, as the other levels do not. (“Socioprag-
matics,” however, seems to have some currency; the 2009 issue of the Journal
of Historical Pragmatics was entitled “Historical Sociopragmatics.”)
First, phonetic variation is not just long-standing in formal study, as
shown previously, but also in the public mind. From the Gileadites inabil-
ity to realize palatal sibilants (Old Testament, Judges 12: 5–6) to Johnnie L.
Cochran’s criticism during the O. J. Simpson trial of the idea that a Black
person could be identi¿ ed on the basis of voice as “racist,” public attention to
so-called accents has been notable.
Second, the mechanics of instrumental or acoustic phonetics, although
important contributors to the earliest modern work on variation (e.g., Labov
1962; Labov, Yaeger, and Steiner 1972), are now freely available to any inves-
tigator who has a computer, a considerable reduction from the thousands of
dollars one would have had to invest to carry out such work only a few decades
ago. The sound analysis program Praat (Boersma and Weenink 1992–2009)
and its add-on Akustyk (Plichta 2009) are the most widely used, along with
PLOTNIK, a vowel plotting and normalization software package developed
by William Labov (2009). Most recently, NORM (2009), a web-based vowel
normalization program, provides even further tools for analysis cost-free.
Third, there has been a reawakening of the importance of phonetics to
phonology, and, to the extent that sociolinguistics must keep up with gen-
eral theoretical advances in the ¿ eld, attention to such integration and depen-
dency is necessary. Variationist implications in both optimality theory (e.g.,
Boersma and Hayes 1991) and exemplar theory (Pierrehumbert 1994) have
been particularly inÀ uential in sociophonetics. For some time the contribu-
tions of William Labov in particular have contributed to this interface in the
areas of vowel shifts and mergers by proposing phonetics-based generaliza-
tions that appear to be inÀ uential in the development of a systematic phonol-
ogy (e.g., Labov 1994).
Fourth, the area of speech science, although long associated with sophis-
ticated phonetics research, is now better attuned to the goals and ¿ ndings of
general linguistics and, even more recently, to the interests of sociolinguistics
in particular. There is a review of a great deal of this work in the introductory
sections of Chapter 8.
Finally, the phonetic level is convenient, not only because even a short
interview with a respondent is likely to contain a considerable portion of
both the sounds and environments one would like to study, but also because,
except for some phonetic caricatures or stereotypes, it is also the level where
both variation and change may go undetected in the speech communities
where phonetic variation, nevertheless, plays an important role. This often