The 25 selected papers contained in this volume reflect the current diversity of interests and research methods within the field of sociolinguistics. Titles include: "What is a Language?"; "The Unreality of Quantitative Figures"; "Addressee-Oriented Features in Spoken Discourse"; "Women's Speech, Women's Strength?"; "Age Identity and Elderly Disclosure of Chronological Age"; "Pragmatic Constraints on Interrogatives in Spoken French"; "Twixt the Scylla of Total Assimilation and the Charybdis of Suicidal Purism"; "Dialect Transmission and Variation: An Acoustic Analysis of Vowels in Six Urban Detroit Families"; "Language Variation Theory in the Light of Co-Occurrence Restriction Rules"; "Realtime vs. Apparent time Change in Montreal French"; "Speech Disorder as a Sociolinguistic Problem"; "A Rebuttal of Essentialist Sociolinguistics"; "The Evaluation of Phonological vs. Phonetic Variation in Dutch Standard Pronunciation"; "Qualitative Insights into Working-Class Language Attitudes"; "Unfiltered Talk--A Challenge to Categories"; "The Concept of Prestige in Sociolinguistic Argumentation"; "Gender as a Speaker Variable: The Interesting Case of the Glottalised Stops in Tyneside"; "There's no Tense Like the Present: Verbal -s Inflection in Early Black English"; "Group Affiliation and Quantitative Sociolinguistics"; "The Role of Vernacularization in Tanzania: Swahili as a Political Tool"; "Analyzing English Lexical Elements in the Language of Dutch Immigrants in the United States"; "Linguistic Measures of Developing Social Gender Identity"; "Mediating Skills in the Development of a Multilingual Society: Perspectives for Britain"; "A Paradigm Regained: Conflict Perspective on Language Use in Bilingual Educational and Social Contexts"; and "The Effects of Styles and Speaking Rate on /1/-vocalisation." (VWL)