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When people communicate, they must understand the variation in language which they hear around them and work out how to replicate aspects, thus conveying social and linguistic meanings in their own speech output.

Sociolinguistic researchers have almost no direct experience of observing speakers' underlying physical vocal tract articulations, and so have little knowledge of articulatory variation. Consequently, the highly complex relationship between articulation and acoustic output does not feature in sociolinguistic theory. In phonetics, such variation is a major topic of research , but social factors are rarely examined.

Recent research on Glaswegian English has shown that use of r-sounds in words like 'car' is diminishing in young working-class speakers. Acoustic phonetic analysis shows wide variation exists, but not the ways this is achieved articulatorily.

This change will be examined using ultrasound to capture realtime images of the tongue. The technique is ideal for revealing the tongue-shapes which produce r-sounds. A methodology to help sociolinguists use ultrasound for observing articulatory variation will be developed,, and the  extent to which the investigation itself affects subjects’ speech quantified. A major output will be a socially-stratified sample of spontaneous speech which will be far more representative of speaker variation than normal phonetic studies.

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