Exploring variation in language

Given that all living languages are subject to variation, it is surprising that the subject was for so long ignored or downplayed by mainstream linguistics. In idealizing the ‘homogeneous speech-community’ for his own purposes, Chomsky (1965: 3), for example, was merely maintaining the prevailing assumption that variation was of little theoretical interest. Studying the relationship between language and society remained something of a taboo until the 1960s, when researchers in the emergent discipline of variationist sociolinguistics argued that no satisfactory account of linguistic change could be achieved without a proper understanding of how variation was structured.

Our focus is on variation within a language, or microvariation, and we look first at the approach of nineteenth-and twentieth-century dialectologists. Their methodology and assumptions differed greatly from that of modern-day sociolinguists, whose work we examine later. Armed with modern recording equipment and applying sociological concepts and methodology, sociolinguists have shown the close relationship between language and a range of extralinguistic or social factors.