Rich and comprehensive academic oeuvre of Professor Zaręba is a result of his research carried not only in the fi elds of dialectology, onomastics, lexicography and lexicology but also sociolinguistics, the last being the subject of the present paper. Alfred Zaręba’s deep interest in sociolinguistics was a consequence of his careful observations of the changes taking place in the contemporary language, analysed by him not merely from the perspective of the system itself but, above all, in the wide context of social and cultural factors. One of these issues was the linguistic norm, and precisely, its considerable loosening. He was also interested in the problem of so called literary “micro-languages”, both in Poland and abroad. His academic intuition turned out to be right as these phenomena belong to the most crucial research fi elds at present.