Analyzing language variation: Where sociolinguistics and linguistic typology meet

This book offers a collection of chapters that explore the interplay between crosslinguistic and intra-linguistic perspectives to the study of language variation.1 Variation is an inherent property of natural languages and is pervasive across several layers: in the performance of individual speakers, within speech communities, across languages distant in time and space. As a general definition, variation can be understood as the co-existence of formally distinct linguistic forms to express the same content. Nevertheless, the nature of variation itself remains constant irrespective of its locus of manifestation. As Croft (2022: 27) observes “the patterns of variation and change found in [. . .] a particular language are in many cases simply instances of patterns of variation and change found across languages”.