ABSTRACT
When we talk about' a language'- in our case, 'the English language' - we must not be misled into thinking that the label should in some way refer to a readily identifiable object in reality, which we can isolate and examine in a classroom as we might a test-tube mixture, a piece of rock, or a poem. There is no such object. The label 'the English language' is in fact only a shorthand way of referring to something which is not, as the name may seem to imply, a single homogeneous phenomenon at all, but rather a complex of many different 'varieties' of language in use in all kinds of situation in many parts of the world. Naturally, all these varieties have much more in common than differentiates them-they are all clearly varieties of one language, English. But at the same time, each variety is definably distinct from all the others.
