​What's in a name? As Shakespeare once so famously pointed out, names have meaning. Lexical variation in the basic sense equates to using different words for the same concept. Think of all the names for 'pants' in English. My favorite variation is 'britches'. I'm interested in lexical variation within and across languages, asking how languages interact.

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Lexical variation is a part of multilingual practices, enabling speakers with access to a wider variety of features and reflecting our human propensity and capacity for creativity and innovation. It has a story to tell, both in Linguistics and Ethnobiology. In the rural village of Nyanjida, it tells us about social organization, revealing social networks, groups, and communities of practice. It tells us about individuality, how personal trajectories and linguistic backgrounds influence an individual’s repertoire. It also tells us about language structure and language features. It tells us about language acquisition, how variation reflects the power of horizontal transmission. Variation serves a communicative purpose, acting as a tool, a signal, a reflection of an individual, a group, a society, a village, a geographical area. Variation provides a way to create boundaries, not just simple lines drawn, but an intricate mapping of overlapping boundaries, some rigid, some fluid, creating various affinities, an ebb and flow. In multilingual ethnobiological lexicons, variation reveals an individual’s knowledge and life experiences, knowledge of the Other, knowledge of the environment, and of plant and animal uses. Some examples of this follow below.

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