De Sociolinguïstiek in Het Nederlandse Taalgebied Anno 1999

This article provides an overview of the Third Sociolinguistics Conference, which was held in Lunteren (The Netherlands) on 8 and 9 March 1999. In particular, attention is focussed on the topics and theories that turned out to play ah important role at this conference. The article begins with a comparison between the contents of the First and Second Sociolinguistics Conferences (1991; 1995) and those of the third conference (1999). The papers presented are classified according to the topics they dealt with. The categories adopted in this overview are those used on earlier occasions by Muysken (1984) to assess developments in sociolinguistic research and by Van Hout, Huls & Verhallen (1992) and Cucchiarini & Huls (1995) in their presentation of the First and Second Sociolinguistics Conferences. Since any classification scheme is likely to be somewhat arbitrary, the same categorisation as in the above-mentioned three papers was used for the sake of comparability. When analysing the content of all the papers presented at the third conference, it appears that four main topics can be distinguished. Two of them are the same as four years ago: 'multilingualism and language contact' and 'pragmatics, interaction and conversation analysis'. Two of them are new: language acquisition and socialisation' and language variation and language change'. The growing interest in the process of language acquisition by members of language minorities in the Netherlands and Flanders, appears to be structural. In 1999, almost half of the contributions are related to this subject. More so than four years ago, the research presented at the conference is embedded in theories or conceptual frameworks. However, they are so diverse that they do not lead to thematic unity. We may perhaps conclude that it is this diversification that gives sociolinguistics its force and vitality