Abstract:The study of the social variation of language, which in the 1960s came to be known generally as Sociolinguistics, has challenged one of the fundamental tenets of Structural Linguistics à la Saussure, who taught that for language to be analysable in terms of its structure, it had to be conceptualized as system devoid of a temporal dimension, and a rigid distinction had to be observed between synchrony and diachrony. From a sociolinguistic point of view language is perpetual in flux and variation, be it temporal or regional or social, cannot be ignored without abstracting away one of its essential features. For, rather than being given, language is subject to modification by the society of its users. Thus, sociolinguistics made linguistic variation its principal object of investigation and explanandum, seeking correlations of speakers’ social class, ethnicity, level of occupation, gender, and age with language varieties. At the same time, however, the temporal dimension of society was generally ignored in sociolinguistic theory building, although it is undeniable that, as a result of urbanisation, social ageing, and migration among others societies change just as much as languages. This paper raises the question of whether the fact that both language and society exist in time and have temporal depth should be recognised in sociolinguistic theory and if so, what the implications would be.