1. Field of study

In everyday life people co-operate and interact with each other in a number of ways: with immediate members of the family in their homes, with friends and neighbours in their local community, with colleagues at work and with complete strangers in meetings further afield. It is in this web of inter-relationships that language is used to forge and maintain friendships, to communicate, to instruct, to enthrall and to carry out all the other functions necessary in any social inter action using the medium of speech.

Language behaviour itself is extremely complex. When viewed in use in society, it is marked by two apparently contradicting characteristics. To participate fully in the activities of a society and to interact naturally with its other members, a speaker must be able to practise the communication code recognised by that society. The use of this communication code, or language, demands mastery of and adherence to the accepted forms of the particular structural patterning the relational framework - pertaining to that one language, otherwise effective understanding between people will prove difficult if not impossible. A speaker must learn the speech sounds of the language, their arrangement in 'words', the construction of sentences and the meanings associated with these 'words' and constructions, if he is to communicate effectively with other speakers in his community.1 Yet any observation of linguistic behaviour in society reveals diversity. Speakers do not all speak in the same way. The dialectologist is interested in aspects of this diversity; in particular as to how the variant patterns of the language are ordered and how the variations relate to each other territorially.

Differences of language are not all of the same order. Indeed some arise from extra-linguistic factors. Two main types of variation need to be distinguished:

- variation within the speech of the individual;
- variation within the community.


  1. On structural patterning and language see Lyons, J. ‘Structuralism and linguistics' in Robey, D. (Ed.) Structuralism: An Introduction; Oxford: Clarendon Press; 1973. On encoding see Moulton, W.G. A Linguistic Guide to Language Learning; New York: The Modern Language Association of America; 1970 and Jakobson, R. and Waugh, L.R. The Sound Shape of Language; Brighton: Harvester Press; 1979