Sociolinguists have always been concerned with place. This chapter summarizes emergence of dialectology in the nineteenth century in the context of the politics of the European nation-state. It summarizes the twentieth-century dialect atlas projects, conducted in the context of a renewed interest in region across the disciplines. The chapter traces ideas about place in quantitative, social-scientific approaches to variation and change. Finally, it outlines several newer ways of thinking about language and place that have emerged in the context of widespread interest in how the social world is collectively shaped in discourse and in how individuals experience language and linguistic variation. Geographers' focus on regions and regional exceptionalism mirrors dialectologists' work of the period in the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada projects. Lesley Milroy and James Milroy brought social network theory to bear on sociolinguistic issues.

This chapter contextualizes the notion of endangered languages in a model of language and society. For sociolinguists, language loss, except as a result of extinction of speakers by natural disaster or mass murder, is an extreme case of a normal ongoing phenomenon, language shift. The fact or belief that the language is appropriately used at a higher level may encourage the belief that it should be used at a lower level. Religion has a major influence on language shift and maintenance both because of the values it assigns to a variety and also as a result of the active management involved in the establishment of an educational system. Education, particularly under the control of national states, has become one of the main forces for language shift and one of the main causes of endangerment of minority-language varieties.