ABSTRACT
While the previous chapter looked (among other things) at the unstable and shifting boundaries of languages (i.e. how languages leak into each other), the present chapter focuses more on variation and leakage within a language. It should be clear from our discussion in the previous chapter that there is a continuum between these two types of variation, and that all these variation types feed into multilingualism. The previous chapter focused on (named) languages as social constructs and the present one focuses on variation in time and space, mostly in English but also in French. Moreover, what the two chapters have in common is the insidious workings of the standard language ideology: just as it distorts many people’s perception of what a language is, it is also responsible for their positioning of the standard variety above non-standard varieties.
