The longitudinal study of a panel of 60 speakers of Montreal French illustrates three different patterns in the relationship between language change in the community, and change across individual speaker lifespans. (1) In the first case, the auxiliary être ‘to be’ is being replaced by non-standard avoir ‘to have’ in an ongoing change in the community, but speakers in the panel were stable in using their earlier-acquired grammar. Since the older speakers reflected the linguistic system they acquired as children, apparent time gives an accurate assessment of the progress of the change. (2) In the second case, the change from alveolar to velar /r/, a substantial number of older speakers in the panel adopted the innovation between their first and second recordings, having acquired the innovation after childhood. In this case, apparent time would underestimate the rate of change and wrongly indicate an earlier date for its inception. (3) The third case is the replacement of the inflected future by the periphrastic future, a change historically well attested from the mid 19 th century. Many of the same 60 speakers who were stable in the use of auxiliaries, and adopters of the innovative velar /r/, became more conservative in expressing future time, increasing their use of the (slowly disappearing) inflected future. This pattern may be responsible for the very “long tail” of some late-stage language changes, as it retards estimates of the time course of change based on apparent time (Sankoff & Wagner 2020). In this presentation, I summarize the results presented in detail in Sankoff (2019), and discuss their interpretation in the light of both child language acquisition and language history. By refining the relationship between apparent time and real time, we can derive a more accurate view of the history of recent changes.