Linguistic variation has most commonly been studied in communities that have the dominant social organization of our time‎:‎ occupational and ethnic diversity‎,‎ socioeconomic stratification‎,‎ and a population size that precludes community‎-wide face‎-to‎-face interaction‎.‎ In such communities literacy introduces overarching‎,‎ extra‎-community linguistic norms‎,‎ and linguistic variation correlates with socioeconomic class‎.‎ Investigating Variation explores a different kind of social organization‎:‎ small size‎,‎ enclavement‎,‎ common occupation‎,‎ absence of social stratification‎,‎ bilingualism with extremely weak extra‎-community norming for the local minority language‎,‎ which shows a very high level of individual variation‎.‎ Nancy C‎.‎ Dorian‎'‎s examination of the fisherfolk Gaelic spoken in a Highland Scottish village offers a number of explanations for delayed recognition of linguistic variation unrelated to social class or other social sub‎-groups‎.‎ Reports of similar variation phenomena in locations with similar social‎-setting and social organization features ‎(‎contemporary minority‎-language pockets in Ireland‎,‎ Russia‎,‎ Norway‎,‎ Canada‎,‎ and Cameroon‎)‎ make it possible to recognize a particular set of factors that contribute to the emergence and persistence of socially neutral inter‎-speaker and intra‎-speaker variation‎.‎ The documented existence of still other forms of social organization‎,‎ rare now but once more widespread‎,‎ suggests that additional forms of linguistic variation‎,‎ as well as other facets of language use related to social organization‎,‎ remain unexamined‎,‎ calling for attention before the few communities that represent them disappear altogether‎.‎