--- - |2 Abstract This paper synthesizes a wide range of literature from sociolinguistics and cognitive psychology, to argue for a central role for the “word” as a vehicle of language variation and change. Three crucially interlinked strands of research are reviewed—the role of context in associative learning, the word‐level storage of phonetic and contextual detail, and the phonetic consequences of skewed distributions of words across different contexts. I argue that the human capacity for associative learning, combined with attention to fine‐phonetic detail at the level of the word, plays a significant role in predicting a range of subtle but systematically robust observed socioindexical patterns in speech production and perception. - Topics in Cognitive Science, EarlyView.