ABSTRACT
Previous chapters have outlined the study of linguistic variation and its application to the questions of language contact and change. We began by defining linguistic variation and explored variation at different levels of the linguistic system. We established the methodological and analytical principles of the variationist approach to the study of language, considering a number of theoretical and methodological issues in conducting variationist analysis at the level of sound systems and grammatical systems. We applied the variationist method to various issues in the study of language change and language contact.
