The following article describes some kinds of dialectological research - linguistic geography, structural linguistics, statistic (quantitative) approach, which have given way to dialectological studies in the sociolinguistic approach. The article indicates a necessity to introduce sociolinguistic parameters, determining linguistic variantivity, i.e. the age, territorial and social origins of a language user, the type of job performed, education level, formal and informal communicative situation, geographic layout of the town inhabited by the group being researched and media accessibility.