Abstract
The Sage Handbook of Sociolinguistics – edited by three well-known researchers in the field of sociolinguistics: Ruth Wodak, Barbara Johnstone and Paul Kerswill – is a comprehensive volume on the state of sociolinguistic research today. The authors aim to answer ‘a long standing need for an up-to-date, comprehensive, international, in-depth critical survey of the history, trajectory, data, results and key figures involved in sociolinguistics’ (back cover), and to address the cultural and linguistic imbalance often found in such books by inviting papers from a range of languages and locations around the world.
As the field of sociolinguistics is so diverse, this volume is necessarily large: an excellent introductory chapter by the editors, followed by 39 chapters divided into six sections (‘The History of Sociolinguistics’; ‘Sociolinguistics and Social Theory’; ‘Language, Variation and Change’; ‘Interaction’; ‘Multilingualism and Contact’; and ‘Applications’). As it is not possible in this short space to discuss all of the 40 chapters, I will limit the review to the structure of the handbook overall, its style and its coverage.
The intended audience appears to be higher-level students and researchers. The style of most of the papers was accessible and did not require too much background knowledge. Many of the papers were excellent introductions to a particular facet of sociolinguistic research, such as the problem of categorizing people according to social class (‘Social stratification’ by Mallinson, ‘Social class’ by Dodsworth and ‘Social network’ by Vetter). However, the handbook would likely be too dense, and have too little guidance (in the form of summary boxes or suggested readings), to be a good undergraduate introductory text. Papers from the volume would, however, make good supplementary reading at an undergraduate level, and the volume should be considered essential reading for any graduate student embarking on sociolinguistic research.
The introductory chapter does a remarkable job of tying together the whole amorphous field of sociolinguistics and, in doing so, describing the structure of the handbook. Section 1 then traces the development of sociolinguistics over the last century, with a chapter on each of the researchers: Ferguson and Fishman, Labov, Bernstein, Hymes, and Gumperz. The second section tackles some of the basics of social theories and categories used in sociolinguistics, such as the issues of globalization and migration. The section titled ‘Language variation and change’ covers the social factors often used in variationist studies, such as individuals versus communities, social classes and networks, as well as two excellent chapters on language change over time, a chapter on the influence of sociolinguistics on formal grammars (by Guy) and a very useful chapter on methods for variationist fieldwork (Wolfram). Section 4, titled ‘Interaction’, contains papers about a range of domains in which discourse has been studied, such as schools and courtrooms, and various other perspectives on interaction. The papers in Section 5 discuss the topics of individual and societal multilingualism. The final section is devoted to five areas where findings from sociolinguistics have been and can usefully be applied: forensic linguistics, educational linguistics, non-discriminatory language use, language rights and literacy studies.
Defining the boundaries of sociolinguistics is a difficult, if not impossible, task. The editors themselves acknowledge that the ‘. . . boundaries between [sociolinguistics] and other sub-domains in linguistics have become blurred’ (p. 1). If one takes the broadest view – as any type of linguistics that takes context into account – the label of sociolinguistics becomes meaningless, because it includes all linguistics bar most formal approaches to grammatical description; however, too narrow a view, and valid subfields are ignored. While it is always problematic to define exactly what constitutes sociolinguistics, or where the boundary should fall, reviewing the contents of several other textbooks and edited volumes on sociolinguistics offers a general view of common topics (Coupland and Jaworski, 2009; Holmes, 2008; Hudson, 1996; Mesthrie et al., 2009; Meyerhoff, 2010; Romaine, 2000; Wardaugh, 2010). Compared to these volumes, Wodak, Johnstone and Kerswill have cast their net very widely, perhaps a little too widely, including topics where language data are used to discuss social issues, rather than social information used to analyze language.
The cost of a net cast too widely is what does not get covered or what gets covered too briefly. For example, in giving 230 pages (Sections 2 and 4) to macro-issues such as multiple facets of ethnomethodology and discourse studies, only four or five papers cover the social influence on language below the level of discourse: at the level of morpho-syntax, phonology or lexis. There are few chapters dedicated to quantitative research methodologies; the vast majority of the methodologies employed are qualitative. While these papers will likely be more relevant to the audience of this journal, it is perhaps not an entirely representative ratio of the research being published.
Another issue to do with coverage was that of overlap between chapters. While the papers in Section 1 are valuable and useful (if sometimes too detailed) for getting an idea of the origins of the field, much – if not all – of this information is repeated in other papers in the volume. An expanded introductory chapter by the editors could have included some more history, and section 1 removed. Finally, it was disappointing that no mention was made of the valuable sociolinguistic work carried out on signed languages (see, for example, Lucas, 2001), given their unique social situation.
Despite these shortcomings, parts of the book are essential reading for any graduate student entering the field of sociolinguistics, as well as for researchers already in the field. Its comprehensive nature and the breadth of topics covered ensure it will be a useful addition to the library of any academic teaching a sociolinguistics course.