Sociolinguistic Variation and Change is a selection of Peter Trudgill's major works since 1990, appearing here in updated and revised form. The book deals with a number of different but related topics: *The role of English in the world, and the nature of Standard English or Englishes *Language as a human issue and how sociolinguistic research might solve educational and other real-world problems *The problematic and interconnected relationships between nation and language and dialect, and the linguistic characteristics of the varieties concerned *Sociohistorical linguistics, in particular the relationship between colonial and motherland varieties of English; dialect contact and language contact; and the sociolinguistically informed dialectology of linguistic change. The major overall unifying theme of the book is linguistic variation and, as the diachronic outcome of linguistic variation, linguistic change.