Book excerpt: This volume contains the papers read at the Second Sociolinguistics Conference of the Association Belge de Linguistique Appliquee (Belgian Association of Applied Linguistics) that was held at the University of Antwerp on the in May, 1980. The papers are grouped around two topics: 'Language and Social Class' and 'Language Attitudes'. The whole is preceded by an introductory article by R. Van Hout in which he presents the Netherlandic language area, describes how sociolinguistics is developing in this area and briefly discusses the essence of each paper.