30 Language Varies
There is substantial variation in language: both within and across language varieties. We’ll see some examples of both of these kinds of variation and I’ll introduce one of the central concepts used in variationist sociolinguistics: the linguistic variable.
All languages exhibit variation
Many linguistic approaches to the study of language are concerned with language variation. As you’ve read about in other modules, theories about how language works rest on evidence that comes about by contrasting the way something is said or signed in two or more different languages, dialects, or varieties.
Language, dialect, variety. Colloquially, the term dialect is used to refer to ways of speaking that people perceive to be substandard, low status, associated with working class, non-prestigious, geographically-isolated, or some derivation or aberration from a ‘standard’ version of the language. The linguistic fact though is that everyone has a dialect. Rather than think about languages and dialects in a hierarchical way, linguists think about dialects as subdivisions of a language. Sometimes, linguists might talk about the “standard dialect” but it’s important to emphasize that no dialect, not even what we might call the “standard dialect” is objectively (linguistically) superior to any other dialect of the language. Another term, ‘variety’ doesn’t have the same negative connotations that ‘dialect’ has, and so we’ll usually use that to refer to subdivisions of a language in this chapter.
For example, consider the Icelandic and Danish sentences in (1) and (2). Both sentence express the same meaning.
| (1) |
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| (2) |
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Obviously some of the lexical items and morphemes differ between (1) and (2) – as expected given that they come from two different languages. At the same time, you can see similarities between them – also as expected since these two languages are quite closely related (they are both North Germanic languages). One syntactic difference between the two examples is the order of the negative marker and the main verb in the embedded clause (hafði ekki ‘have not’ in Icelandic and ikke havde ‘not have’ in Danish). If we were looking at this data like a syntactician, we might look at (1) and (2) and use the two different word orders (i.e., VERB-NEG vs. NEG-VERB). We’ll call this cross-linguistic variation: different ways of doing the same thing in different languages or varieties.
But within a single language or variety – or even a single person – the specific realization of abstract structures (like word order) can vary. Consider the rhyming couplet in (3) from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (386, 670).
| (3) |
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Example (3) shows the same word order variation that we see in (1) and (2) but here, the two different ways of doing the same thing appear within the same language! And while technically spoken by two different characters, the two sentences were written by the same person! This isn’t that surprising though because Early Mode