I-IV -- Contents -- Contrastive Sociolinguistics: An introduction -- Part I Bilingualism - Multilingualism -- On comparing the centers of plurinational languages: The example of German -- Sociolinguistic characters: On comparing linguistic minorities -- Bilingualism-multilingualism: Its characteristics and properties -- In search of the deeper message: Codeswitching rationales of Mexican-Americans and Malaysians -- Multilingualism through migration: A comparison of internal and external migrant communities in Switzerland -- A contrastive analysis of language use and contact in the Alemannic area: Colmar and Freiburg -- Language attitudes on either side of the linguistic frontier: A sociolinguistic survey in the Voeren/Fouron-area and in Old Belgium North -- Part II Language planning and language politics -- Educational language choice - multilingual diversity or monolingual reductionism? -- Ecological and non-ecological approaches to language planning -- The inequality of languages: Economic aspects of language estimation -- Language borders in northern France and in Belgium: A contrastive analysis -- Feminist language planning and titles for women: Some crosslinguistic perspectives -- Pidgins and Creoles as literary languages: Ausbau and Abstand -- The typology of dictionaries of English-based pidgins and Creoles -- Part III Cross-linguistic discourse analysis -- Contrastive sociolinguistics and the theory of "cultural scripts": Chinese vs English -- Contrastive discourse analysis and misunderstanding: The case of German and English -- Two polite speech acts in contrastive view: Aspects of the realization of requesting and thanking in French and Italian -- Concepts of communicative virtues (CCV) in Japanese and German -- Referential perspective in speech acts: A comparison between German and Japanese -- Male-female speaking practices across cultures -- Narrative universals? Some considerations and perspectives -- Index