Studying Variation

Variation in the Present and Past

Human language is, and always has been, variable. It is characterized, in the words of the linguist William Kretzschmar, by “extensive (really massive) variation in all features at all times” (2009: 3). This variability has functions that seem to be fundamental to human communication: the messages we convey depend not just on what we say, but how we say it. How we speak reflects who we are and where we belong, or would like to belong. It also reflects each situation, our purposes, roles, and attitudes.

The most obvious variation, that of which everyone is aware, has to do with geography. People speak differently in different places; and the differences generally grow with distance. Geographical variation – differences between “dialects” – was also the first kind of linguistic variation to be systematically studied, and dialectology remained for a long time the only discipline that studied linguistic variation. More recently, approaches such as sociolinguistics and pragmatics have come to focus on other kinds of variation. Sociolinguists study variation in relation to a wide range of variables, such as age, gender, social class, and ethnic and religious background; both sociolinguists and pragmaticists are concerned with different styles and domains, and pragmaticists are in particular interested in the different functions and uses of linguistic variants, such as politeness or insult (see Chapters 9 and 10).

Geographical and social variation were for a long time studied separately. Most early sociolinguistic studies focused on communities within large cities (as is reflected in the early term “urban dialectology”) where geographical variation was not particularly relevant. Dialectology, on the other hand, tended to have an “antiquarian” interest: to record traditional dialectal forms before they died out, rather than to study the full scale of actual variation.

This division has now to a large extent disappeared. Sociolinguistic studies routinely take geography into account, and dialectology has become informed by insights both from sociolinguistics and from human geography. Dialectal variation is no longer seen only as a matter of physical distance: rather, it is a question of distance in terms of contact.