A CRITICAL LOOK AT THE VARIATIONIST APPROACH TO STUDYING LANGUAGE

One of the approaches to language acquisition and language use is the variationist approach pioneered by William Labov in the 1960’s. Contrary to many theories in linguistics which seek for categorical rules to explain the underlying principles in language, the variationist approach claims that language varies systematically in accordance with social characteristics of the speakers. The very basic question which arises here is that if language use varies from a situation to another, how can it be described, and more importantly explained as a systematic apparatus. Labov’s theory of linguistic variation seem to be central to the issue since it starts with real phonological sample analysis and takes into consideration the sociolinguistic factors behind such variation. However, when it is compared with more systematic schools in linguistics and language acquisition research, one finds out that although both Labovian and categorical approaches to language studies seem to be right in their system of enquiry, there is a sharp gap between the two models in providing a cogent explanation of the mechanisms and processes involved in language production, use and also acquisition. The present paper tries to deal with these gaps and suggest a solution for dealing with such mismatches in theory of language variation as a central issue in language studies including language acquisition.