Table of Contents

Preface viii

1 Where It Begins 1

2 Synchronicity and Sociolinguistics 25

3 A Crescendo of Research 53

4 Roots of Variationist Thinking 74

5 Sociolinguistics in the Street 88

6 Why Statistics Is in Your Head 107

7 Sociolinguistics From the Heart 121

8 Branching Out; Bursting at the Seams 131

9 Why Do You Like Variation? 158

10 Launching the Future 169

Afterword 185

Appendix A List of Interviews 186

Appendix B VSLX Family Tree 187

References 194

Index 202

About the Author

Sali A. Tagliamonte is a Professor in the Linguistics Department at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is author of Analysing Sociolinguistic Variation (2006) and Variationist Sociolinguistics: Change, Observation, Interpretation (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), among other books and has published on African American varieties; British, Irish, and Canadian dialects; as well as child, teen, television, and Internet language.

Reviews

"...a useful introduction to some of the major theoretical tenets of the field...for undergraduates just beginning to wade into sociolinguistics who are looking for an accessible path towards some of the discipline’s theoretical underpinnings. Making Waves provides an important and useful form of documentation for how sociolinguistics has grown so rapidly over the past five decades and where variationist sociolinguistics in particular seems to be heading in the years to come." - LINGUIST List, September 2016