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This paper reports on the analysis of the use of indefinite article forms (a/an) in front of vowel sounds, as well as certain established and emerging invariant tags (yeah, innit, right, okay, you get me) in spoken London English. The study used the Linguistic Innovators Corpus (LIC; Gabrielatos et al., forthcoming), a 1.3 million word corpus comprising the transcribed and marked-up interview data from the ESRC-funded project, Linguistic innovators: the English of adolescents in London (Kerswill et al. 2008), as well as the Corpus of London Teenage English (COLT)(Stenström et al. 2002). The research methodology combined approaches and techniques from sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics. Variables were examined individually and in cross-tabulations, using both manual/semi-automated and automated techniques. The analysis of indefinite article forms examined both linguistic and sociolinguistic variables, but only the sociolinguistic variables yielded statistically significant results for use of indefinite article forms. This suggests that the linguistic variables play a minor role, if any at all, in the choice between a or an in front of a vowel sound. The sociolinguistic variables comprised the speakers’ sex, age, ethnicity and place of residence, as well as the ethnic make-up of the friendship networks. In particular the speakers’ ethnicity and place of residence, emerged as the strongest predictors of the use of a before vowels. The indefinite article form a before vowels seems to have undergone a process of reallocation in which its sociolinguistic status has been realigned. While the form a in front of vowels earlier seemed to have been avoided, either …