The 6th Jenny Cheshire Lecture: Prof. Lesley Milroy: “She twanged a piercing r”: some effects of national ideologies and local attitudes on trajectories of language change Sociolinguistic research has considered trajectories of language change from various perspectives, the chief of which are approaches which conceive of language change as community internal, and language contact models. The former do not generally consider the effects of contact. From the earliest days of modern Sociolinguistics (Weinreich, Labov and Herzog’s paper of 1968), ideologies and attitudes have also been included in models of language change. However, only very few studies over the last 50 years or so have systematically pursued an agenda which addresses the effects of ideologies either at the national or local level on trajectories of change; on the whole, research on attitudes/ideologies and research on processes of change has proceeded along separate tracks. In this presentation, I focus on the relationship between ideological (attitudinal) change and phonological change, referring to frameworks developed within linguistic anthropology, as well as the more familiar analytic methods of historical linguistics and sociolinguistics. The manner in which different national perspectives on language can be shown to give rise to dramatically different linguistic outcomes is considered, with reference to Britain and France. Socially salient changes in the use of non-prevocalic /r/ over two centuries in England, Scotland and the United States are considered, in relation to particular ideological discourses.