Rethinking (from) the Islands

Abstract This paper calls for rethinking not only studies in the Philippines but also, from them, the premises of variationist sociolinguistics. Through a grounded-theoretic thematic analysis of 77 sociolinguistic studies, it identifies seven patterns shaped by postcolonialism. Key findings show that degree of language contact does not automatically determine the social salience of differences and that most studies depart from “canonical” methodologies, prioritizing multilingualism and (post-) colonial histories/ideologies over “variable-rule” analyses. These findings motivate a dual framing: rethinking variation in the islands , which revisits Philippine sociolinguistic research as a collective, relational body of work that transcends disciplinary boundaries; and rethinking variation from the islands , which uses these insights to refine variationist theory to better account for postcolonial ecologies. While latter-wave variationism advances post-structural insights (e.g., emic perspectives, indexicality), Philippine sociolinguistics extends these by embedding them in multilingual, postcolonial contexts, advancing alternative epistemologies that position these settings as generative sites for theorizing variation itself.