ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of sociolinguistic research from the Nordic region, which consists of five sovereign countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. In all these countries, sociolinguistics was established on a strong tradition of dialectology in the official languages of each country. To this base was added variationism, so dialectology and variationism were dominant themes of research through the 1990s.
Since then, two major international developments have had a significant impact on sociolinguistics. One is international migration. Multilingualism and the integration and education of migrants and their children in all the Nordic countries have been important themes in sociolinguistic research in recent years. The other major development is what could be called linguistic globalization, which has led to a greater interest in the study of the role of English in the Nordic countries, but also in studying sociolinguistic phenomena outside of the Nordic region.
