Abstract
The evolution of two basic premises in 20th-century structural linguistics created the conditions for the emergence of variationist sociolinguistics as an interdisciplinary field. These premises are cultural relativism and orderly linguistic heterogeneity. Cultural relativism is an anthropological tradition inherited by linguistics, according to which no culture or language of a speech community is classified as inferior or underdeveloped irrespective of the level of Western technology that the speech community has achieved. Under the influence of the principle of cultural relativism, linguists posited the ‘functional equivalence and essential equality of all languages, and rejected mistaken evolutionary stereotypes’ (Hymes, 1974, p. 70). At a first stage the relativistic premise applied to comparisons across languages but when the orderly heterogeneity premise was postulated by variationist sociolinguists in the late 60’s, it evolved to comparisons across different varieties or styles of a same language. No variety within a language would be considered inherently superior to the others as concerns its structure even though functional distinctions among them would be acknowledged.
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Bortoni-Ricardo, S.M. (1997). Variationist Sociolinguistics. In: Hornberger, N.H., Corson, D. (eds) Encyclopedia of Language and Education. Encyclopedia of Language and Education, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4535-0_6
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