Since the beginning of the new millennium, research on the German language in Austria has been characterized by new approaches: alongside work in the tradition of philological dialectology, discourse analysis in the "Viennese school" paradigm and "classically" correlative sociolinguistics, there has been an increasing number of studies in the areas of language dynamics-based variationist linguistics, interactional sociolinguistics, as well as modern attitudinal and perceptual research. This volume reflects the dynamism of this field of research, approaching it from various theoretical and empirical perspectives. It is the standard pole of the "vertical" spectrum of linguistic varieties that is central to all nine contributions compiled in this publication.