Viewed as the cognitive and communicative activity of a speech community, a language is a historical object. Its setting has the aspects shown in the diagram:

Many languages have more than one name, including their autonym and exonyms. The names of the language and of the people (speech community) are distinguished, and variants of the name appearing in the literature are assigned their place. The ISO code of the language is indicated.

The ethnographic setting of the language comprises its geographic distribution, the ethnic affiliation of its speech community and the organization of its society in social, economic, political, spiritual and cultural terms as it is reflected in the documentation of level 1.

The genealogical setting of the language has two parts: its internal setting concerns its dialects; its external setting concerns its genetic affiliation.

The cultural setting of the language comprises what has traditionally been known as its external history. Particularly relevant are the literacy of the speech community and the role of (oral) literature, including traditional text genres.

The social setting of the language, again, has two parts: The internal setting concerns its sociolects, including ritual language, avoidance language, juvenile language etc. The external setting concerns contact of this language with surrounding languages and its vitality in this situation. It also provides a basis for an account of borrowings in (the description of) the language system.

The typological overview puts the language in its typological context, but also provides a summary introduction to the language system. The most salient traits of the phonology, morphology and syntax, including such items as head vs. dependent marking, alignment, word order patterns etc., are put into typological contrast.

In most of these sections, the account is reasonably a historical one.