Network research in sociolinguistics proposes that integration in a local community network fosters speakers' retention of local linguistic variants in the context of constraint from external or standard dialects. In most sociolinguistic network inquiry, a speaker is assigned a single score along an index representing the aggregate of several network and other social features. This paper suggests that modern network methods in contiguous disciplines can productively apply to sociolinguistics, thereby easing not only more generalizable quantitative analysis but also new questions about the relational nature of linguistic variables. Two network analysis methods—cohesive blocking and Quadratic Assignment Procedure regression—are employed to judge the social network factors molding the retreat from the Southern Vowel Shift (SVS) in Raleigh, North Carolina. The data stem from a 160-speaker subset of a conversational corpus. Notable network effects point out that network proximity to Raleigh's urban core fosters retention of SVS features, and that network similarity between speakers corresponds to linguistic similarity. Modern social-network methods can add to linguistic analysis by offering a holistic picture of the community's structure.