ABSTRACT
What is the essential difference between dialectal variation and diatypic or register variation?2 Prototypically, dialects differ in expression; our notion of them is that they are ‘different ways of saying the same thing’. Of course, this is not without exception; dialectal variation arises from either geographical conditions (distance and physical barriers) or social-historical conditions (political, e.g. national boundaries; or hierarchical, e.g. class, caste, age, generation and sex), and, as Hasan has shown (see Hasan, forthcoming) dialects that are primarily social in origin can and do also differ semantically. This is in fact what makes it possible for dialect variation to play such an important part in creating and maintaining (and also in transforming) these hierarchical structures. Nevertheless dialectal variation is primarily variation in expression: in phonology, and in the morphological formations of the grammar.
