Introduction: Sociophonetics Studies of
Language Variety Production and Perception
Dennis R. Preston, Oklahoma State University and
Nancy Niedzielski, Rice University
Introduction
In 2002 Erik Thomas suggested that the “[m]elding of sociolinguistics and
phonetics is sometimes referred to as sociophonetics.. .” (189), and it is not
at all odd that phonetics would qualify for this singling out, for the variables
treated in the history of the sociolinguistic enterprise have very often been
phonetic. In the journal Language Variation and Change, 133 articles appeared
in the ten-year period 1999–2008 (vols. 11–20); of these, 61, just under 46%,
dealt with phonetic topics exclusively, and many more included phonetic vari-
ables among others or used them as a major consideration in determining the
distribution of other variables, most notably morphological ones.
There is little doubt, then, that phonetics is particularly important to cur-
rent work in sociolinguistics, nor that it was important to the sociolinguis-
tic side of traditional dialectology, the most direct forerunner of the modern
enterprise, as evidenced, for example, in the age- and sex-related variable fea-
tures uncovered by Gauchat in Charmey, Switzerland (1905), some of which
were later con¿ rmed as participants in real-time change by Hermann (1929),
or in the work of McDavid (1948) on post-vocalic /r/ in South Carolina, sub-
titled “A social analysis.” Even the allied social sciences have attended to pho-
netic variation (e.g., Fischer 1958, who found that good boys said “walking”
and not-so-good-boys said “walkin’”).
One might argue, then, that sociophonetics is has always been simply one
branch of the linguistic part of sociolinguistics, rather than the more current
melding Thomas mentions. In other words, if sociolinguistics designates the
social as well as linguistic factors that must be taken into consideration to
account for the distribution of linguistic variables, whether stable or in À ux,
then the phonetic level is just one of those that must be included and has no
theoretical privilege over phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, or prag-
matics, nor would its concerns be excluded from historical linguistics, psycho-
linguistics, neurolinguistics, applied linguistics, etc.... There are, however,
several reasons that phonetics has the special status Thomas suggests and,