This chapter discusses the inspection of the relevance of language to power and social diversity. It explores the elastic impact of power on the social life of living languages. Sociolinguists and historical linguists have demonstrated that linguistic evolution has been shaped by many forces, including political circumstances that are not egalitarian. Einar Haugen promoted the study of language within its ecological context. Some critics of quantitative variationist sociolinguistics have noted that scholars who classify speakers based on pre-ordained social categories, like race, may miss important nuances in linguistic behavior that defy easy circumstantial classification. Hymes affirmed that communicative events demand a high degree of communicative competence as related to language usage throughout the world. William Labov's study of the social stratification of English speakers in New York City is illustrative of urban linguistic stratification. The majority of speech communities throughout the world set the indigenous standard linguistic norms.

This chapter addresses the issue of what makes endangered language speakers different, and why it should matter to be aware of the great diversity when working on the description, documentation or revitalization of endangered languages. The nature of endangered language communities is addressed by considering them through the lens of their geographic locations and configurations. It is considered from the perspective of different concepts of language and speech communities, in order to show how both concepts are intricately intertwined in endangered language communities. The issue of language endangerment in communities is approached from the perspective of the evolution of their level of consciousness and their evolving attitudes, in the context of recently developed discourse about the preservation of worldwide biocultural diversity. Linguists working on endangered languages often find themselves in challenging field situations that their academic training has done little to prepare them for.