As noted in chapter 1, the four languages analyzed in the present study differ in nearly every conceivable way: in their geographic locations, language families, cultural settings, social histories, and characteristic speech events and literacy events. The present chapter provides further details about these differences. While it is not intended as a complete ethnography of the language situations, the chapter does provide sufficient background to interpret the sociolinguistic patterns described in following chapters.

Several of the differences among these four languages can be related to a continuum of institutional development, comprising considerations such as the synchronic range of written registers, the social history of literacy, the range of spoken registers, the number of speakers, and the extent to which the language is associated with a bounded community in a particular geographic location. English is near one extreme of this continuum, having a long history of literacy, a very wide range of both spoken and written registers, a very large number of speakers, and a wide distribution as both a first and second language across many countries. Nukulaelae Tuvaluan is near the opposite extreme on this continuum: it has a relatively short history of literacy, very few written registers, few spoken registers, few speakers, and a speech community that is restricted primarily to a single atoll in the Pacific.

Korean and Somali are intermediate along this continuum, and they also show that these characteristics are not perfectly correlated.