Sociolinguistics as an area of study has experienced explosive growth over the past twenty years, with the appearance of many journals and books. Of interest in its own right, Sociolinguistics can also supply valuable information and ideas to linguists, sociologists, anthropologists and educationalists. After a period of varied approaches and disparate findings, discernible attempts are being made to evaluate, rationalize and integrate work in the field (see for example, Hudson, 1980; Dittmar, 1976; and Saville-Troike, 1982). In line with this trend, a major aim of this book is to use a range of different sociolinguistic approaches on a single speech community, in order both to test their analytical and descriptive value and to work towards a more unified descriptive framework. The focus is on language use rather than language proficiency (although the two are obviously related).