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Jones 1998, Kingston 2000, Marshall 2004; Amos, forthcoming; Piercy, forthcoming). 3. Urban and Rural in Social Dialectology The dominance of urban areas in the application of variationist method is intriguing for at least a couple of reasons. Firstly, social dialectological studies of cities tend not to open the urban area up for a close investigation of its internal geographical diversity, and secondly, when urban dialectological studies are probed in more detail, there is often actually relatively little social diversity examined (for perfectly reasonable practical methodological reasons), certainly no more than one could comfortably find in rural areas in the same country. Urban social dialectology, with a few exceptions, has, until recently and like many of its counterparts in the social sciences in the 1960s and 1970s, often (to cite the human geographer Doreen Massey) “continued to function, by and large, as though the world operated, and society existed, on the head of a pin, in a spaceless, geographically undifferentiated world’ (Massey 1984: 4). Since other social factors have perhaps seemed more pressing than geography—class, ethnicity, gender—and since random sampling has often been used (and consequently there has been a desire to hold all other external factors constant to allow for the careful control and analysis of the chosen variable social factors), spatial variation within the city has been largely ignored. Labov’s (1966) study of “New York City”, for example, was, of course, a study of just the Lower East Side of NYC and, even then, only a part of it (Labov 2006: 104). So space was carefully controlled out of the study, and spatial variation within the neighbourhood (let alone within the city) itself not examined. But this is typical of variationist research in general. Whilst the researchers themselves are usually honest in the text that data come from just one (or perhaps two) restricted parts of large city X, those studies are often then referred to as studies of X, rather than of very small subsections of X. A few early studies did, however, (albeit briefly) consider intraurban diversity. Trudgill’s 1974 study of Norwich random-sampled from five different parts of the city since doing so ‘opens up the possibility of investigating geographical variation’ (1974: 22). He