2. Types of variation

The language is highly variable and continually changing. There is a long history of academic interest in language variation and change, which has broadened out recently with increasing attention paid to the 'new Englishes' spoken in many parts of the world.

Like other languages, English varies in several different ways. For instance, language differs in written texts and oral speech. Language also varies in relation to different speakers or writers, where they come from and what social groups they belong to; and it varies for the same individual in different contexts, for instance depending on whether the speaker perceives a context as formal or informal, and depending on the purpose of that context.

There are numerous varieties of English. The major five types of variation are:

1) region; 2) social group; 3) field of discourse; 4) medium; 5) attitude.

Any use of the language necessarily involves variation within these five types. The first two types of variation relate primarily to the language user. People use a regional variety because they live in a region or have once lived in that region. Similarly, people use a social variety because of their association with some social group. These varieties are relatively permanent for the language user. At the same time, we should be aware that many people can communicate in more than one regional or social variety and can therefore switch varieties according to the situation. And of course people move to other regions or change their social affiliations, and may then adopt a new regional or social variety.

Other types of variation relate to language use. People select these varieties according to the situation and the purpose of communication. The field of discourse relates to the activity in which they are engaged: the medium may be spoken or written, generally depending on the proximity of the participants in the communication; and the attitude expressed through language is conditioned by the relationship of the participants in the particular situation. A common core is present in all the varieties and it is the fact that justifies the application of the name 'English' to all the varieties.

We shall focus mainly on regional and social varieties of English, which relate primarily to the language user. Language varieties are not simply linguistic phenomena. They carry important social meanings.

2.1. Regional variation

Varieties according to the region have a well-established label both in popular and technical use - that is DIALECT. Linguists concerned with different regional and social varieties of English often distinguish between ACCENTS and DIALECTS. A regional accent refers to features of pronunciation, which convey information about a person's geographical origin. So accents are varieties that differ only in terms of pronunciation. A regional dialect refers to features of grammar and vocabulary, which convey information about a person's geographical origin. So dialects are varieties that differ in terms of grammar and vocabulary. Speakers who have a distinctive regional dialect will have a distinctive regional accent; but the reverse does not necessary follow. It is possible to have a regional accent but speak Standard English, which conveys no information about geographical origin. Regional dialects are also typically associated with a range of regional accents - some are much 'broader' and more distinctive than the others. Within a country, there may be a prestige or neutral accent, which conveys no information about geographical background. The most famous example occurs in Britain, with the accent that has long been called Received Pronunciation or RP.

A dialect is a variety of a language spoken by an identifiable subgroup of people. Traditionally, linguists have applied the term dialect to geographically distinct language varieties, but in current usage the term can include speech varieties characteristic of other socially definable groups. Determining whether two speech varieties are dialects of the same language, or whether they have changed enough to be considered distinct languages, has often proved a difficult and controversial decision. Linguists usually cite mutual intelligibility as the major criterion in making this decision. If two speech varieties are not mutually intelligible, then the speech varieties are different languages; if they are mutually intelligible but differ systematically from one another, then they are dialects of the same language.

There are problems with this definition, however, because many levels of mutual intelligibility exist, and linguists must decide at what level speech varieties should no longer be considered mutually intelligible. This is difficult to establish in practice. Intelligibility has a large psychological component: If a speaker of one speech variety wants to understand a speaker of another speech variety, understanding is more likely than if this were not the case. In addition, chains of speech varieties exist in which adjacent speech varieties are mutually intelligible, but speech varieties farther apart in the chain are not. Furthermore, sociopolitical factors almost inevitably intervene in the process of distinguishing between dialects and languages. Such factors, for example, led to the traditional characterization of Chinese as a single language with a number of mutually unintelligible dialects.

Dialects develop primarily as a result of limited communication between different parts of a community that share one language. Under such circumstances, changes that take place in the language of one part of the community do not spread elsewhere. As a result, the speech varieties become more distinct from one another. If contact continues to be limited for a long enough period, sufficient changes will accumulate to make the speech varieties mutually unintelligible. When this occurs, and especially if it is accompanied by the sociopolitical separation of a group of speakers from the larger community, it usually leads to the recognition of separate languages. The different changes that took place in spoken Latin in different parts of the Roman Empire, for example, eventually gave rise to the distinct modern Romance languages, including French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian.

In ordinary usage, the term dialect can also signify a variety of a language that is distinct from what is considered the standard form of that language. Linguists, however, consider the standard language to be simply one dialect of a language.