A major goal of variationist sociolinguistics is to develop a socially sensitive theory of language change, working from the premise that the seeds of change lie in synchronic variation. Scholars have generally agreed that such a theory needs to take account of both social and language internal dynamics, but little progress has been made in seeing how these two dimensions fit together. Furthermore, variationist work on both social and linguistic dimensions (the nature of social categories; theories of chain shifting) has often been carried out within highly controversial frameworks, and a work on social dimensions of change and variation is usually unintegrated with work on attitudes and ideologies.

Using the language ideological framework developed by linguistic anthropologists (notablely Silverstein, Irvine, Gal) I, attempt to show in this paper how social and more specifically linguistic constraints on change interact, with particular reference to a set of vowel changes currently underway in Detroit African American English. One central claim of this framework is that ideologies reflect not only laypersons' naove attiudes to language, but are capable of shaping the directions of specific linguistic changes. The paper as a whole suggests procedures for integrating several separate dimensions of the language change problem discussed by Weinreich, Labov and Herzog in 1968.