The present paper is intended to provide the basis for the study of weakly differentiable functions on rectifiable varifolds with locally bounded first variation. The concept proposed here is defined by means of integration by parts identities for certain compositions with smooth functions. In this class the idea of zero boundary values is realised using the relative perimeter of superlevel sets. Results include a variety of Sobolev Poincaré type embeddings, embeddings into spaces of continuous and sometimes Hölder continuous functions, pointwise differentiability results both of approximate and integral type as well as coarea formulae.
As prerequisite for this study decomposition properties of such varifolds and a relative isoperimetric inequality are established. Both involve a concept of distributional boundary of a set introduced for this purpose.
As applications the finiteness of the geodesic distance associated to varifolds with suitable summability of the mean curvature and a charac- terisation of curvature varifolds are obtained.
