Introduction

Beginning with the pioneering work of Labov, Shuy, Fasold, and Wolfram in the mid and late 1960s, the study of variation has formed one of the key areas, if not the key area, of sociolinguistics. Alone among the various sociolinguistic subfields, the study of variation has been enriched by two regular conferences – NewWays of Analyzing Variation (NWAV), now in its 36th year, and, beginning in 2001, the International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE) – as well as by its own journal, Language Variation and Change . In recent years, conferences on language variation have also been held in England (VIEW 1998, VIEW 2000), and a sociolinguistics laboratory dedicated to the study of linguistic variation has been established at Nanjing University in China. Moreover, although the study of variation began with a focus on varieties of English, French, and Spanish, variationist studies now encompass many languages ranging from Guyanese and Jamaican Creoles to Brazilian Portuguese to Chinese to American Sign Language and Australian Sign Language. Variationist approaches have also met with considerable success in studies of second language acquisition. However, despite the prominence of variationist studies in North American sociolinguistics and, increasingly, in other areas of the world, most widely used textbooks in sociolinguistics devote only a chapter or two to the study of variation. Only one textbook in sociolinguistics, Chambers (2002), is devoted primarily to variation. This volume brings together a group of contributors widely recognized for their contributions to variationist sociolinguistics with the purpose of providing accessible overviews of the major areas of concern for students of linguistic variation.