In addition to phenomena which arise in interactions between individuals or
small groups, sociolinguistics is concerned with larger-scale interactions between
language and society as a whole. One such interaction islanguage shift. Here, in a
multilingual setting, one language becomes increasingly dominant over the other
languages, taking over more and more of the domains in which these other
languages were once used. Understanding the conditions which facilitate language
shift and the dynamics of the process itself is properly viewed as a sociolinguistic
task. It would, of course, be possible to raise many other research topics in the study
of language which share a social focus, but because it will play a central role in
much of our subsequent discussion, we shall close this introduction by going into a
little more detail on the contemporary study of language variation and change.