This article takes a diachronic perspective, back to a moment in our own past when a certain class of writings began to demand a kind of understanding different from that demanded by writing in that culture up to that time. Such a possibility is part of our culture but not part of many others, and is, among other things, a significant cognitive development. The search to locate how writing functions among a culture's communicative practices can involve identifying domains that are unique to it, for example, where some kinds of writing attain a standing such that they are not meant to be understood as the transcription of a testimony or other oral act. Work in the ethnography of communication has barely begun to look at writing, despite the fact that the status of writing bas recently preoccupied much of literary theory. (Variation, sound change, adolescents, urban dialects, suburban dialects, schools) Parents' socioeconomic class is related to, but does not determine, category affiliation, and while category affiliation is a significant predictor in phonological variation, parents' socioeconomic class is not. Differences between Jock and Burnout cultures entail differences in social network structure and in orientation to the urban area, and hence to urban sound changes. These categories, called “Jocks” and “Burnouts” in the school under study, embody middle-class and working-class cultures respectively, and articulate adolescent social structure with adult socioeconomic class. The use of local phonological variables in adolescence is determined by a social structure within the age cohort, dominated by two opposed, and frequently polarized, school-based social categories. Detailed participant observation among Detroit area adolescents provides explanations for the mechanisms of the spread of sound change outward from urban areas and upward through the socioeconomic hierarchy.
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