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analysts and to acoustic analysis. Trudgill (1983: 35-41), for example, points to a number of examples of fieldworker inaccuracies in the Norfolk localities of the Survey of English Dialects (SED) and Trudgill, Gordon and Lewis (1998: 39) and Trudgill (2004: 47) argue that sometimes the transcriptions in the SED are simply not detailed enough to be helpful. Traditional dialectology was not able to systematically analyse intra-speaker variability, whereas such variability has, from the start of social dialectology, to the present, played a very important role in our theorisation of the mechanisms of change and the meaning of variation in contemporary speech communities (Labov 1966, Bell 1984, Coupland 2007). Because the fieldwork for traditional dialectological surveys was so time-consuming, many surveys used a large number of fieldworkers and it was often difficult to ensure each one was working to the same script. Britain (1991), for example, found evidence in the SED that different fieldworkers in Eastern England had transcribed the vowel continuum between [ʊ] and [ʌ] for vowels in the STRUT lexical class (Wells 1982) differently, triggering dialectologists using the data later to classify the variation in that part of the country incorrectly (see also Ryfa, forthcoming). Traditional dialectology tended to place more importance on geographical coverage than on depth within a particular locality— very often localities are represented by just one (old rural male) person who may or may not be representative of that section of his community in general. Although by no means fully representative, sociolinguistic dialectology has seen it as imperative, if we wish to understand more about the social locus of linguistic change, to draw its informants from a much broader cross-section of the population2.
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So social dialectology made some rather radical advances, and rather suddenly, relative to traditional approaches, and at the same time as addressing these methodological issues, it also, for the most part, shifted its attention from rural areas to urban areas.
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Usually, however, social dialectological studies of individual speech communities tend to exclude the under-16s and very old people, with the latter being largely ignored and the former subject to specific studies looking at children or adolescents in isolation from the adults in their communities.