Judging from the literature and general opinion, SSENYC had considerable impact on the field of sociolinguistics. It initiated a field of quantitative, linguistically-oriented sociolinguistics, or as it is commonly referred to today, the study of linguistic change and variation. The annual meeting of NWAVE (New Ways of Analyzing Variation) has reached its thirty-fourth year, and the organizers of the most recent session at NYU (for the first time in New York City, as it happens) announced that over 300 abstracts were received. The journal devoted to quantitative analysis, Language Change and Variation, is in its eighteenth year. The common theme that unites the authors of these papers is that considerable insight can be gained into the structure of language by the study of linguistic variables, usually in spontaneous speech, rather than by accepting the limitation to invariant behaviour that is characteristic of introspection.

These papers draw upon data from groups of various sizes, but the main body of data that they draw from is normally a research project of a scope comparable to SSENYC, designed to record and analyze a sample of speakers that is representative of a speech community. The common understanding that unites the field – what I have called the central dogma of sociolinguistics – is that language is located in the speech community, not the individual. Drawing upon the larger perspective set forth by Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog (1968), we can say that the linguistic behavior of individuals cannot be understood without knowledge of the communities that they belong to.