Sociolinguistics (here called variationist linguistics) has been misunderstood and misrepresented in second language acquistion (SLA) research. In spite of that, several productive studies (many of which use the VARBRUL statistical program) have made significant contributions to our understandings of variation in SLA data, contributions which touch on the linguistic and not the social concerns of such data. The failure of SLA researchers who belong to the so-called 'dominant paradigm' (or Chomskyan or Universal Grammar (UG) research programme) to realize that belief in a so-called variable competence is not a prerequisite to variation studies has been particularly harmful. On the other hand, the failure of sociolinguists to take psycholinguistic matters seriously has been another serious drawback to interfield co-operation; a summary of a plausible variationist psycholinguistics (within an SLA setting and allowing UG interpretation) is provided.
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