This book is intended as an introduction to the sociolinguistic situation in those countries in which German has the status of a national language, with some consideration of those in which it has regional official status. Because a language is an index of the cultures and societies of its users, the monograph may be of value to German Studies and European Studies programmes as well as to students of sociolinguistics and to teachers and students of German. It supersedes Language and society in the German-speaking countries (1984). Momentous sociopolitical changes have taken place since the appearance of that monograph. I am referring not only to the end of the cold war and the unification of Germany, but also to changes in the self-images of Austria, Switzerland and Luxembourg expressed in language use and language planning, the ‘redrawing of the map of Europe’, influencing the use and status of German as an international language, and internal sociopolitical changes within the various countries, e.g. relating to the status of women.

The publication, in 1990, of Stephen Barbour's and Patrick Stevenson's Variation in German has given us a comprehensive and complementary text which is a critical and contrastive account, devoted specifically to variation, written from the context of Anglo-American sociolinguistic research. This abrogates the necessity to add such a perspective which was absent from my 1984 publication (Barbour 1985). The present monograph, like its predecessor, offers an interpretative synthesis of local studies of the relation between language and society in the German-language countries, complemented by some of my data, to present a coherent picture. The findings of much recent research have been incorporated into this book.