Abstract
This paper reviews the possibilities of analysis of linguistic variation in Czech. First, we focused on dialectology and variationist sociolinguistics as two disciplines which look at language variation from the perspective of language production.
We argue that traditional dialectology is oriented towards the in-breadth description of language variation and it offers a convenient method to register differential features, especially lexical items and items which are in decline. On the other hand, variationist sociolinguistics aims for an in-depth analysis.
It is concerned primarily with the phonological and grammatical variation and tries to explain it on the basis of its relation to the social stratification in the given society (community). Perceptual dialectology and the research on language attitudes analyze language variation from the perspective of both language perception and its evaluation.
They are based on the idea that our linguistic behaviour is co-determined by our subjective perception of the language use. We argue that for a better understanding of the Czech linguistic situation, we need to utilize findings from all of these disciplines.