An examination of the interrelations between language and society in the German-speaking countries.

1. Introduction; 2. The historical background; 3. The German tradition of dialectology; 4. Language and society: urban speech, urbanization and 'new dialectology'; 5. Sociolinguistic variation and the continuum of colloquial speech; 6. Standard and non-standard German: their rôle in society; 7. Language in multilingual societies: the Federal Republic and Switzerland; 8. Contact and conflict; 9. Conclusions and prospects.