Labov gets deep into the issue of social factors in linguistic change, framing the "transmission problem" thus: How do children learn to talk differently from their mothers? He proffers a summary of research that deftly juxtaposes British children becoming conscious of low-status variants between eight and 12 years old, morphophonemic reduction by generation in Tok Pisin creole (cuz the kids just don't give a fuck), some stuff about when Pennsylvania kids learn to produce vowel splits even when the researcher giving them the words (they're young kids) doesn't have the split that I can't really follow well because who can keep track of their crazy vowel shifts down there, and some interesting but incoherent stuff about a high school in Detroit that doesn't hold because the researcher is trying to draw prestige conclusions about transmission from conceptual categories like "jock" and "burnout" that just do not work, and I'll accept that the class situation in the US is different and I am an ignorant, egalitarian Canadian, but come on, I watch TV too: There is no rich kid-poor kid split, or at least not an uncomplicated one. ( )