Leslie and James Milroy are kind of like linguistic superheroes, complete with an unnecessarily soap-operatic back story. Until now I mostly appreciated them for the "complaint tradition" that went into my SSHRC proposal, but Leslie's article in here about tracking social variation is certainly worthy of note as well. Starting from work by Labov, Romaine and others on class, prestige and social networks in language change, Milroy takes us up to what feels like "go" for the discipline, a multifaceted scale of valences that encompasses class, network, and "lifemode," which mostly but not entirely means mobility. These are concepts you can work with!

the rest of the book is prolly good too. whatever.

NB FOR READING GROUP. DID NOT READ COVER TO COVER ETC.

Later: I have employed Chambers's article on stable variation, age graded variation, and change, which lags in flash-bang but is a good overview, and has some important Canadian numbers on dialect change for my work. In Ontario some young people still say "serviette"!

Later still: Oh, and Anttila's partially ordered constraints article is in here too! (Not as good as Reynolds's floating constraints,but). I just keep coming back to this fucker. ( )