Sociolinguistic theory provides a dynamic view in which change is apprehended in progress, so that leaders and laggards can be identified and both the course of its diffusion and its rate can be delineated. The philosopher William James distinguished concepts, the idealization of reality, from percepts, the apprehension of reality. In order to demonstrate how the analysis of variable linguistic data proceeds and what its correlations with independent variables reveal, the chapter discusses a well-studied variable of English often symbolized (CC) but sometimes called (more descriptively) final stop deletion or morpheme-final consonant cluster simplification. The core social attributes affecting language use are social class, social networks, sex and gender, ethnicity, and age. Sociolinguistics is the science of parole or ergon or performance. Like grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence is neither taught nor consciously learned. It is simply acquired by virtue of human nature, and deeply embedded in it.
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