In order to study the oldest version of a country's language, scientists typically use a NORM to determine what exactly that variant is for a specific location. The NORM is a non-mobile, older male from the countryside or a rural area, to match the acronym. However, linguistic variations of NORMs across an entire country are certainly not the norm. Large differences in language can be observed across social classes, age groups, living areas and genders, whereas the Average Joe is just a middle class man living in the city and is only not the answer to all linguistic questions. First, the oldest inhabitants of a country are those who use the most traditional forms of language. This is what Labov was mainly concerned with, because he believed that the present could be used to explain the past. “Older people's use of the linguistic feature represents the typical use of that feature in the community when they themselves were young” (Wagner, 2012, p. 372), in contrast to how it is used by the average adult today. This is a phenomenon called “apparent tense construction,” which accounts for the fact that older people stop following modern language after a certain age. Labov concluded this by determining the spread of vocalized /r/ in New York in the 1960s, when he realized that young people were beginning to use this phoneme while older people were unaware of this change. . To a large extent this is reflection, since older people do not seem to do it consciously. Even though the elderly are the voices of the past, it is the youth of a country who shape a new language by opposing traditional methods. , therefore also those of speech. In the previously mentioned example, the young people of New York were those who, by and large,...... middle of paper ....../ William Labov. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Retrieved April 27, 2014. Labov, William. (1990). The intersection of gender and social class during linguistic change. Language variation and change 2: 205-254. Retrieved April 27, 2014. Christine, M. (2007). Social class, social status and stratification: revisiting familiar concepts in sociolinguistics. University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics, 13(2), 149-161. Accessed April 27, 2014. Trudgill, P. (2003). A glossary of sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Retrieved April 27, 2014. Wagner, S.E. (2012). Age classification in sociolinguistic theory. Language and Language Compass, 6(6), 371-382. Retrieved April 27, 2014 from Academia.edu database. Wardhaugh, R. (1986). An introduction to sociolinguistics. New York, NY, USA: Blackwell. Retrieved April 27, 2014.