This paper begins with a discussion of the assumptions basic to the study of both language and social dialects: verbal systems are arbitrary, all languages or dialects are adequate as communicative systems, they are systematic and ordered and learned in the context of the community. A survey of current work and findings in dialect studies follows. In the last part of the paper, the author discusses research needs in the areas of (1) field techniques (size of sample necessary for a reliable study of social dialects; role of race, sex, and social class of the fieldworker in affecting the speech of an informant; elicitation procedures which can get at judgments of the grammaticality of nonstandard structures apart from judgments about social acceptability; and importance of statistical calculations in comparing the various quantitative measurements that are made), (2) descriptive studies (intonation, Black English in the South, nonstandard white dialects, age-grading, acquisitional studies of nonstandard dialects, and more descriptive date on the role of sex in language), and (3) theoretical issues (way in which observed linguistic variation can be accounted for in a linguistic model of description, extent to which a description can encompass more than one idiolect, and descriptive differences between several types of language situations). (DO)