The importance of variation and change

Language variation and change highlight the fact that language universally involves alternative forms and structures that compete with each other in usage. For instance, speakers of Scottish varieties of English may in certain circumstances front the initial consonant in thing and pronounce it as fing. A speaker from Cumnock in Lowland Scotland or from Portavogie in Northern Ireland may occasionally drop the subject relative pronoun in the man (who) called me was our neighbour. An eighteenth-century speaker and his twenty-first-century descendant may both use kneeled down, although the latter is more likely to use knelt down. As is evident from this arbitrary choice of examples from the present volume, language is inherently variable, both across time (diachronically) and at any specific point in time (synchronically). In the investigation of both synchronic and diachronic linguistic variation, the classic variables relating to the language producer are geographical, stylistic and social in nature. The fact that especially social information (like age, sex, socio-economic class) figures more prominently in the study of more recently produced data follows naturally from the fact that such information is less readily accessible for older data (cf., however, Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003).