Editorial: New horizons in sociophonetic variation and change

Arguably the main concern of modern linguistics has been to put forward evidence of an unchangeable and stable grammar in humans. At the same time variability remains a very fundamental property of human language. Language varies across communities, individuals and speech acts, and with language variability comes language change. The question at heart of the scientific endeavour concerned with linguistic variability is what causes language to change? This question is present at the core of disciplines such as historical linguistics, contact linguistics and, especially, (variationist) sociolinguistics. Sociolinguistics as a discipline has made great contributions to our understanding of variability in language and the complex workings of the human communicative faculty by showing that variation in speech follows quite robust patterns that bear relationships with social variables. The papers in this issue of 'Lingua' are concerned with some of the key topics of modern sociolinguistics, namely to which extent individuals' and communities' social histories are reflected in the production of language and to which extent our social experiences influence our perception of language. The current issue even touches upon the question of how linguistic variation commences at an individual level.