ABSTRACT
The small economy of Israeli academic life has produced an admirably large handful of sociologists that are clearly of international repute and of intergenerational importance. There are few full-time sociolinguists in Israel and, necessarily, fewer are the doctoral training programs and the research centers that focus squarely on developing sociolinguistic expertise and that can do so in a reliable, long-term fashion. The sociology of language provides access to additional variance in the study of situational factors governing social group-membership, sub-ethnic group-membership religious group-membership, kinship group-membership, political group-membership, occupational group-membership and age-group-membership. All modern societies, and those based on massive and highly varied immigration even more than most, reveal complex and recurring multiple group memberships. The fluctuating boundaries, the saliencies, the conflicts and congruencies between these memberships are what sociology has to offer the social sciences and the public at large.
