De Sociolinguïstiek in het Nederlandse Taalgebied Anno 2003

This article presents an overview of sociolinguistic research in the Dutch-speaking community of the Netherlands and Belgium. The overview is based on the contributions to the 4th Sociolinguistic Conference held in March 2003, after three earlier conferences in 1991, 1995 and 1999. Compared to the earlier conferences, the 2003 conference shows an increased number of papers, due to an increased involvement of Flemish researchers. In terms of sociolinguistic subdisciplines, the main developments are a decrease in the research of multilingualism and language contact, and a steady flow over the years of linguistic variation research, and of interaction and discourse studies. The most striking development, however, is the fact that almost half of the papers at the conference (49%) are concerned with aspects of Dutch and Belgian multicultural and multilingual society. Again 76% of this body of research is concerned with education. For this reason the authors survey the present-day relation between sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. They conclude that in the Dutch-speaking community and internationally, applied linguistics has developed into a field that encompasses sociolinguistics and presents a stage for the presentation of sociolinguistic research.