 Some hold that idiolects in this sense do not exist or that the notion is useless or incoherent, but are nonetheless happy to use the word “idiolect” to describe a person’s partial grasp of, or their pattern of deviance from, a language that is irreducibly social in nature. The substantial debate, here, is not over how to define a word. It turns, rather, on whether an idiolectal perspective on language is to be preferred to a non-idiolectal one. Someone taking an idiolectal perspective on language treats idiolects (in something like the first sense) as having ontological or investigative priority over social languages, conceiving of the latter as nothing but more-or-less overlapping idiolects. Someone taking a non-idiolectal perspective will see social languages as ontologically distinct from and prior to the individual idiolects of those who speak them. At issue, then, is what we should take languages to be.