Variation in the use of ain't in an urban British English dialect

ABSTRACT Ain't occurs as a sociolinguistic variable in working class speech in the town of Reading, England. The phonetic realizations of ain't in Reading English do not accord with traditional etymologies, depending more on the syntactic environment in which ain't occurs than on the standard English forms from which they are usually assumed to derive. The phonetic variants are also marked for semantic function in tag questions. Variation in the use of ain't can be explained as reflecting an ongoing linguistic change (sociolinguistics, dialectology, language change, theoretical linguistics).