Word.ws English Dictionary

variationist

variationist noun: a sociolinguist who studies systematic patterns of variation of linguistic forms.

Noun

variationist (plural variationists)

  1. A sociolinguist who studies systematic patterns of variation of linguistic forms.

Adjective

variationist (not comparable)

  1. Focused on systematic patterns of variation of linguistic forms.
    • The central ideas of variationist sociolinguistics are that an understanding of language requires an understanding of variable as well as categorical processes, and that the variation witnessed at all levels of language is not random.2013, Robert Bayley, “Variationist sociolinguistics”, in Robert Bayley, Richard Cameron, Ceil Lucas, editors, The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 11

Forms of variationist

pluralvariationists

Origin of variationist

From variation + -ist.

Questions about variationist

What does variationist mean?
Variationist means a sociolinguist who studies systematic patterns of variation of linguistic forms.
What part of speech is variationist?
Variationist can be a noun or an adjective.
What is the plural of variationist?
The plural of variationist is variationists.

Words near variationist in the dictionary

  1. variational
  2. variational calculus
  3. variationality
  4. variationally
  5. variationism
  6. variationist
  7. variationists
  8. variations
  9. variations of the field
  10. variative
  11. variatively

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: variationist (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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