Linguistic Variation

Languages and their users show considerable variability. While crosslinguistic variation amongst the world’s 7,000 or so languages is self-evident, there exists significant variation amongst individuals (i.e., individual differences) and within and across communities of language users (i.e., sociolinguistic and dialectal variation). For instance, at the individual level, there is variability in the rate with which children acquire language and in adults’ ultimate attainment. There is also consistent language-internal variation in the way users produce language. This is evident both in how they say something (e.g., differences in pronunciation of words) and what they say (e.g., differences in the expression of the same or similar ideas). Finally, there is variation across linguistic communities in the form of dialects, which mark language users as part of a sociolinguistic and geographically defined group. Linguistic variation is important because it sheds light on how languages are acquired and represented, how they interface with other cognitive and social variables, and how variation leads to language change across time.