Jennifer Smith is Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Glasgow. Her research is in language variation and change, concentrating on the origins and development of dialect from infancy onwards. Mercedes Durham is a Senior Lecturer in Sociolinguistics at Cardiff University. Her research looks at how linguistic variation and language change are acquired, transmitted and viewed by individual speakers and across successive generations.

'For scholars interested in language acquisition, local linguistic variation, style shifting, or the idiosyncratic charms of tiny children, Smith & Durham offer an intriguing text for intellectual consumption.' Rachel Sona Reed, Language in Society

• 1. Introduction; 2. Methodology; 3. Getting to grips with the data; 4. Lexical variables; 5. Lexical-phonological variables; 6. Phonetic variables; 7. Morphosyntactic variables; 8. The acquisition of sociolinguistic variation: synthesising our findings.