During the past three decades, with sociolinguistics emerging as a major field of linguistic research, historical sociolinguistics has been established as an important subfield of historical linguistics. The papers in the present volume - most of which were first presented at the Twelfth International Tromso Symposium on Language: Historical Sociolinguistics, held at the University of Tromso on June 9-11, 1994 - contribute to a much needed theoretical discussion of this subfield as well as bringing together a considerable body of empirical data pertaining to the description and analysis of historical sociolinguistic conditions.