Exclusive experience with standardized languages produces an expectation that speech community members will assess competing variants by their supposed correctness. This does not happen in the persistently divergent but socially neutral variant use of Embo Gaelic speakers, including close kin and age mates. Communities elsewhere show both variation akin to Embo's personal‐pattern variation and similar social‐organization and social‐setting features: small population size, isolation, use of a minority language unrelated/distantly related to the dominant language, weak/absent extra‐community linguistic norms, social homogeneity with high interaction density and multiplex social roles, absence of linguistic accommodation. The ideologies of linguists from dominant‐language societies hamper recognition of different linguistic ideologies among other peoples. The importance of personal‐pattern variation to individual voice in homogeneous communities is discussed and exemplified. Ongoing transmission of individual variant‐use patterns is seen to have been in keeping with high‐variation language input to children and with diffuse child‐care patterns and peer‐group structure.