Compare methods

	Real-Time Study of Language Change	Variationist Sociolinguistics
Field	Linguistics	Linguistics
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1994	1972
Originator	William Labov (and the variationist tradition)	William Labov
Type	Longitudinal design for observing language change directly	Quantitative field study of socially conditioned linguistic variation
Seminal source	Sankoff, G., & Blondeau, H. (2007). Language change across the lifespan: /r/ in Montreal French. Language, 83(3), 560–588.	Labov, W. (1972). Sociolinguistic Patterns. University of Pennsylvania Press. ISBN: 9780812210521
Aliases	Real-Time Analysis, Trend and Panel Study, Longitudinal Language Change Study	Variationist Analysis, Labovian Sociolinguistics, Quantitative Sociolinguistics
Related	4	4
Summary	The real-time study of language change observes change directly by comparing comparable data from the same speech community gathered at two or more actual points in time. Where apparent-time analysis infers change from age differences in a single snapshot, real-time study watches the community across the calendar, either by drawing a fresh sample of the same community years later (a trend study) or by re-recording the very same individuals (a panel study). It is the gold standard for confirming that a change has occurred and for distinguishing community-wide generational change from change within individual speakers over their lifespan.	Variationist sociolinguistics is the quantitative study of how linguistic variation is structured by social and linguistic factors. Pioneered by William Labov in the 1960s and 1970s, it treats alternative ways of saying the same thing — the 'linguistic variable' — as systematically conditioned by speaker characteristics (class, age, sex, ethnicity), stylistic context, and the surrounding linguistic environment, and it uses statistical modeling of natural speech to reveal the orderly heterogeneity beneath apparent randomness.