ILanguage issues may have a political dimension, and English has played a major role in this around the world. In this chapter, we look into sociolinguistic aspects involved in politics and nation building, for instance whether English should be adopted to serve in all official functions as a national or official language, or whether a local language, accessible to larger sections of a community, should be adopted instead. We discuss how and to what extent governments should plan and orchestrate language-related activities in education and public discourse, and we look at language policies implemented in the US and Ireland as cases in point. We discuss the impact of governmental bodies on language planning as in the Speak Good English movement in Singapore, and present efforts to achieve language revitalization, which are preeminent considering language obsolescence around the world. The chapter ends with a look at language rights in migrant communities.

In this chapter we will disco≠≠≠ver that language variation is a normal characteristic of speech on all language levels: in the sounds of accents, words, in grammar but also in discourse. When speaking, we always face alternative choices, and these are determined by our regional and social backgrounds and by the context of situation. We will discuss the concept of the sociolinguistic variable in more detail and find that variation is rule-conditioned and systematic. We focus on all actors and factors involved: the social dimension of variation (individuals, groups, communities) and its social correlates (region, class, gender, ethnicity, education). Last but not least, we will look at the spread of innovative features and trace patterns of diffusion from individual speakers, the point of origin of change, throughout wider society (via processes such as actuation, diffusion, and embedding).

In this chapter we trace the development of the field from its beginnings to the present. Before the start of sociolinguistics proper in the early 1960s, regional dialectologists had already made considerable efforts to explore the spatial dimension of language variation, using different methodologies to collect data on regional dialects. The impact of the so-called sociolinguistic turn is discussed with reference to Labov’s early work (on the island of Martha’s Vineyard and in New York City), and some principal findings and methods of early work in the field are introduced. We will take a first look at the subsequent waves of variationist sociolinguistics, social network theory and communities of practice, which entail a focus on individual speakers and their social grouping and ordering as well as their orientation and affiliation with other speakers in indexical relationships. The chapter concludes with some recent developments and a presentation of current research themes.

In this chapter we will investigate how sociolinguistic theory overlaps with selected areas of applied linguistics. We revisit the question how discrimination operates in the language ideology of Standard English and find out how this may entail serious impediments in domains such as education and health advice. We look at how anthropological and ethnographic issues have an impact on cultural misunderstandings, how insights from variation and change can be used to help improve children’s reading and writing skills, and will discuss the involvement of sociolinguists in dialect maintenance and revival issues. There are special sections of forensic sociolinguistics and legal aspects of language usage, and we present hands-on cases of real-life issues where sociolinguistics is relevant, particularly the court case following the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2013.

… you will notice differences in content and structure compared to those you have read and worked with so far. You will already have noticed that the introductory “In this chapter …” looks different, longer, and there are no key terms and take-away messages. Over the generously counted four years I spent writing this book, for the longest time I had no idea what to do with Chapter 10, to be frank. It was clear that the textbook, like all books, needed to finish in style to come full circle, but I came to realize that a simple chapter summary was neither necessary nor exciting. For a while, I was toying with the idea of bringing some big themes together – variation, identity, data, attitudes – but I could not really envisage something that would satisfy my own expectations or benefit BA students learning about sociolinguistics. As we have seen how diverse the field is, how much there is to learn and discover and research, synthesizing it all and then coming up with my personal interpretation or even projection of future developments seemed a bit, well, presumptuous. I was at a loss about what to do.

We go back in history and discuss the historical dimension of sociolinguistics. We focus on life in the British Isles in the Early Modern period and discover that most of the British population spoke regional and social varieties. As a result of profound changes in society, the history of English is manifold and more diverse than is suggested by a Standard-oriented lens only. We look into language standardization in Late Modern England (1600–1900) and discuss the validity of data, as special care needs to be taken when assessing written data from times when education and schooling were a rare privilege. We present English language ideologies in general, particularly relating to standardization and the persistence of dialect variation. We end with a presentation of groundbreaking studies in English historical sociolinguistics to show how one can gain insights into variation and change despite methodological challenges.