Language is indissolubly linked with the members of the society in which it is spoken, and social factors are inevitably reflected in their speech. In this new and updated edition of his highly successful textbook, Downes surveys the various ways that language can be studied as a social phenomenon. He discusses the known relationships between language variation and large-scale social factors, showing how the variation runs along 'fault lines in social structure?, such as divisions between social clases, the sexes and different ethnic groups.