Geographical or areal variation:
"It is a universal characteristic of human language that speakers of
the ‘same’ language who live in different parts of a continuous
territory do not speak in the same way. Careful observation shows
that such variation is usually smooth and gradual: the speech of
each locality differs in some feature or features from the speech of
each neighbouring locality, but without seriously impairing mutual
comprehension. Successive small differences accumulate as one
crosses an area, and in an extensive territory this accumulation of
differences may result in total mutual incomprehensibility between
the speech belonging to distant parts of the territory being
examined."
[Penny (2000),
Variation
and Change in Spanish, CUP: 1]
Listening comprehension (definition)
A couple of examples:
.
-
Text
and
Audio (The
linguistic variety spoken by an adult speaker from Tyneside -
Newcastle)
-
Linguistic cartography
[from Trudgill, Dialects of England]
(The geograpical distribution of the second person pronoun)
Regional voices (British Library)
