Free variation
Phonetic varieties not affecting meaning / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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In linguistics, free variation is the phenomenon of two (or more) sounds or forms appearing in the same environment without a change in meaning and without being considered incorrect by native speakers.[1][2]
Sociolinguists argue that describing such variation as "free" is very often a misnomer, since variation between linguistic forms is usually constrained probabilistically by a range of systematic social and linguistic factors, not unconstrained as the term "free variation" suggests.[3] The term remains in use in studies focused primarily on language as systems (e.g. phonology, morphology, syntax), however, since "[t]he fact that variation is 'free' does not imply that it is totally unpredictable, but only that no grammatical principles govern the distribution of variants."[4]