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ersity of means of expression employed in the languages of the world. At the same time, though, researchers have come to understand that many of the features of language are universal, both because there are universal aspects to human experience and because language has a built-in biological basis. This latter subject belongs to the subfield called neurolinguistics, which studies how language is realized in the human brain. The connection can be revealed through experiment or by studying the way brain damage can lead to disruptions of language function in disorders like dyslexia or aphasia. Or it can be revealed in more subtle ways, like the slips of the tongue that people make, which can shed light on the mental circuitry of language in something like the way a computer malfunction can shed light on how it is programmed or how its hardware was designed. It can also be revealed by the changes that can take place in language and by the limitations which make some changes impossible. Language as a Social Phenomenon The social life of language begins with the smallest and most informal interactions. Every conversation is a social transaction, governed by rules that determine how sentences are put together into larger discourses--stories, jokes, or whatever--and how participants take turns speaking and let each other know that they are attending to what is being said. The organization of these interactions is the subject of the subfield called discourse analysis. Another, related, area of study concerns the literary uses of language, which involve the particular rules that shape poetic structure or the organization of forms like the sonnet or the novel, and which often make special use of devices like metaphor--though to be sure, linguists have discovered too that metaphor and figurative language are essential elements of everyday forms of speech. At a larger level, the field of sociolinguistics is also concerned with the way the divisions of societies into social classes and ethnic, religious, and racial groups are often mirrored by linguistic differences. Of particular interest here, too, is the way language is used differently by men and women. In most parts of the world, communities use more than one language, and the phenomenon of bilingualism or multilingualism has a special interest for linguists. Multilingualism raises particular psychological questions: How do two or more languages coexist within an individual mind? How do bilingual individuals decide when to switch from one language to another? It also raises questions at the level of the community, where the question of which language to use is determined by tacit understandings, and sometimes by official rules and regulations that may invoke difficult questions about the relation of language to nationality. In many nations, including the US, there are currently important debates about establishing an official language. Multilingual communities are interesting to linguists for another reason: Languages that come into contact can influence each other in various ways, sometimes converging in grammar or other features. Under certain social conditions, a mix of languages can give rise to 'new' languages called pidgins and creoles, which have a particular interest for linguists because of the way they shed light on language structure and function. Often, though, the result when languages come into contact is that one becomes dominant at the expense of the oth