Synchronic variation

All languages that we can observe today show variation; what is more, they vary in identical ways, namely geographically and socially. These two parameters, along which variation occurs, are in principle independent of each other, although we shall see that there are ways in which they (and others to be discussed later) are interlinked. We shall consider each in turn.

Geographical or diatopical variation

It is a universal characteristic of human language that speakers of the ‘same’ language who live in different parts of a continuous territory do not speak in the same way. Careful observation shows that such variation is usually smooth and gradual: the speech of each locality differs in some feature or features from the speech of each neighbouring locality, but without seriously impairing mutual comprehension. Successive small differences accumulate as one crosses an area, and in an extensive territory this accumulation of differences may result in total mutual incomprehensibility between the speech belonging to distant parts of the territory being examined.

We shall see in Section 4.1.2 that the northern part of the Spanish Peninsula displays this kind of variation; that is, we can observe there what is known as a dialect continuum. A village-by-village journey from the west coast of Galicia to the Costa Brava reveals at each stage only small linguistic differences between a particular village and its neighbours on either side, these differences being few where communications are good between the villages concerned and more numerous where communications are poorer.