characteristics of certain universal properties,

a fact which limits sity po particular language, it is difficult to find any two speakers who use their language in exactly the same way.

Our speech is somewhat like our signatu lexical items we use, in our pronunciation, and even in the syntactic structures that occur in our speech.

Yet, there are limits to this diversity among individual speakers, for communication is possible only because all speakers of a language share a certain basic, underlying system of knowledge about phonology, semantics, and syntax .

On the one hand, every human language must make use the amount of diver- ssible among different languages. On the other hand, within any re-it is unique. We all differ to at least a slight extent in the When we investigate language, we are faced with the dual problem of universality and diversity. In the broadest sense, all human languages are the same-all are instances of the general, universal phenomenon language. But, since no two people use their language in the same way there are as many representations of language as there are human beings who use language.

The term idiolect has been devised to describe the speech of a particular individual If we study many samples of idiolects from all over the world, we find that some idiolects are more similar to one another than are other idiolects.

In other words, certain idiolects share linguistic features not Tound in others. By comparing idiolects in this way, we can arive at a view of the different languages of the world.

And, of course, in exactly the same way, we can divide the speakers of a language into groups where the speech of each group contains certain features not found in the other groups dialects of a language .

A procedure such as this would serve to identify the 27

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