Preface -- Historical sociolinguistics - theories and methods -- Social networks, communicative acts and the multilingual individual. Methodological issues in the field of language change -- Toward a speaker-based account of language change -- Traditional historical linguistics and historical sociolinguistics -- Child-to-parent address change in Polish -- Historical sociolinguistics - dead languages -- Sociolinguistics and dead languages -- Decay of suffixation in a corpus language -- Historical code-switching and bilingualism -- Mixed-language business writing: five hundred years of code-switching -- Sociolinguistics in historical language contact: the Scandinavian languages and Low German during the Hanseatic period -- Linguistic variation and the historical sociology of multilingualism in Kven communities -- Historical sociolinguistics - varieties of English -- Middle English variation: the London English Guild Certificates of 1388/89 -- The chaos before the order: New Zealand English and the second stage of new-dialect formation -- Developments and change in Dublin English -- African American English: verbal -s and be2 in Hyatt's earlier and later corpus -- Historical sociolinguistics - Norwegian -- Sociolinguistic studies on the basis of medieval Norwegian charters -- Contributing factors in the making of the post-medieval urban dialect of Trondheim -- Subject index.