Blackwell Reference Online

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As Edward Sapir remarked (1921: 147), “everyone knows that language is variable.” Variability in language is within everyone's experience of using and listening to language, and most people show some degree of interest in it. Despite this, however, linguistic theory has until quite recently paid relatively little attention to variation, and in many branches of inquiry languages have been treated as if they were wholly or mainly invariant entities, or as if the variability that does exist within them were unimportant, accidental, or inessential. Variability within a language or dialect and variation across languages have not been central concerns in the dominant linguistic theories of this century – Saussurean theory, American and Prague School structuralism, and Chomskyan theory. One consequence of this, to which we return below, is that linguistic theorizing has been largely based on standardized forms of languages, rather than on the more variable forms of naturalistic speech.Within descriptive linguistics, the main exception to this is what can be called the variationist paradigm, which is based on the research methods and analytic techniques developed by William Labov (see especially Labov 1966c, 1972), on the critique of current linguistics set out by Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog (1968), and on ideas developed in several papers by Labov himself. Many important principles are ... log in or subscribe to read full text