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The Sociolinguistics Laboratory was created in July 1982 to further the study of natural speech in its social context, with special emphasis on the mechanisms by which language change comes about in different contact situations in Canada and elsewhere. A major focus is on the structure, use and evolution of Canada's official languages, in both majority and minority guises, as well as the interaction between them via code-switching, borrowing and grammatical convergence. Many other language pairs (e.g. Tamil/English, Fongbe/French, Wolof/French, Ukrainian/English, Igbo/English, Finnish/English) are also investigated in this connection. Other research streams explore the origins and development of language in the diaspora and the effect of normative prescription on everyday usage.