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2 Regional Dialectology Varieties of Language (语言变体） What do we mean by Variety? Hudson(1996,P.22) defines a variety of language as “a set of linguistic items with similar distribution,” (“社会分布相似的一套”)a definition that allows us to say that all of the following are varieties: Canadian English, London English, the English of football commentaries, and so on. Linguistic Items Sociolinguists in most cases study social distribution of particular linguistic items, for example words, sounds, or grammatical constructions. Let us give some examples of linguistic items. In England, the sound /v/, as in sun /svn/, is a typical southern sound, found in southern England and in South Midland, while this sound is not used among speakers of dialects in North Midland and northern England, where, for example, the word sun is pronounced /sun/, with the sound /u/, which is found in put /put/ in most dialects also in the South (some areas have /v/). The English phonemes /v/ and /u/ are different linguistic items. In the English dialects of England, the most widespread past tense of catch /′k??/ is catched /′k??t/, while the standard dialect and some other dialects have caught /k??t/. The English past tense forms catched /′k??t/and caught /k??t/are different linguistic items. “语言项目”可以指整个语言系统，也可以指某一语言系统的某个音、某个词或某个语法规则。 with similar distribution It means that the social conditions of these language items are almost the same. “具有类似社会分布”指这一组语言项目出现的’s and the listener’s age, gender, education, nationalities, different communicative settings, etc. “社会条件”指人具有的所有社会属性。说话人和听话人的年龄、性别、受教育程度、民族种族等，言语发生的交际场合、交谈者双方的关系等等。 交际场合：正式和非正式 变体可以大到一种或几种语言。如英语的变体有英国英语、美国英语、加拿大英语、澳大利亚英语、新加坡英语、香港英语、中国英语等。 小到一个语音。北京话中的女性变体“井清 星”。 变体还可以再有变体。如美国英语又分为标准英语和黑人英语，而黑人英语根据地域不同有底特律黑人英语、洛杉矶黑人英语等变体。 Language Variety(语言变体) （祝畹瑾） 语言变体是由具备相同社会特征的人在相同的社会环境中所普遍使用的某种语言表现形式。 如果一些词语只有女性使用，这些词语成为女性变体。 Varieties of language In a word, there exist types or varieties of the same one language, and they ar