The term was first used by Denise Deshaies-Lafontaine in their 1974 dissertation on Quebecois French, with early work in the field focusing on answering questions, chiefly sociolinguistic, using phonetic methods and data.
[2] The field of sociophonetics, and sociolinguistics generally, began in the 1960s and 70s with the work of William Labov who found statistical correlations between the use of certain pronunciations and membership in social categories.
These early investigations tended to focus on variation and change in vowels, and they were conducted almost exclusively in the United States on American English.
[6] Of particular interest to sociophoneticians is the sources and causes of variation in speech, with many studies focusing on differences in pronunciation between regions, social classes, races and ethnicities, genders, sexes, sexual orientations, ages, and within speakers.
For example, young boys will often lower their voices before any pubescent, physical changes occur in their vocal tract in order to distinguish themselves from girls and establish themselves as "masculine".