It was not until the 1960s, with the work of William Labov, when sociolinguistics was established as an independent subdiscipline within linguistics, that a theoretical framework for language change with an innovative approach was presented (see Weinreich, Labov & Herzog (1968)). This has led to a paradigm in linguistics in which scholars extrapolate from small present-day changes in language use to larger attested cases of language change in history. This overview considers research on language change and the various issues which have arisen and been discussed over the past few decades. The article considers recurrent themes in language change, related to the sources of change, the nature of the factors involved and, importantly, the significance attributed to the latter. It also addresses the methodologies applied to the field from the comparative method and internal reconstruction to the text corpus and sociolinguistic/variationist approaches of recent years. Further sections of the article deal with issues such as pathways of change, e.g. grammaticalization, and with explanatory models of language change, such as speaker-induced language change, contact accounts and the typological perspective. The debate between functionalism and formalism is also given consideration. It is an obvious truism to say that, given the dynamic nature of language, change is ever present. However, language change as a concept and as a subject of linguistic investigation is often regarded as something separate from the study of language in general. Recent research into the topic, however, has strived to highlight the continual nature of change and has been concerned with understanding the precise mechanisms of change just as much as with providing linguistically acceptable accounts of attested changes. The latter also benefit from cross-fertilization through diversified approaches.