This study explores the hypothesis, suggested by research grounded in the apparent-time model, that in any given period most people are neither progressive nor conservative concerning ongoing language changes. Drawing on the Corpus of Early English Correspondence, which spans over 270 years, a computational model was developed to determine which language users were progressive and which conservative with respect to several ongoing changes between the early 15th and late 17th centuries. The degree to which language users participated in changes in progress clearly depended on the type of language change analyzed, the stage of development of the change, and the rate of diffusion of the process over time.