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Written and developed by an international team of writers, Introducing sociolinguistics (IS) is an entry-level textbook designed for advanced undergraduate courses focusing on sociolinguistics, language and culture, and/or the sociology of language. Although it joins a distinguished set of textbooks designed to cover much of the same content published in recent years (e.g. Hudson 1996; Meyerhoff 2006; Holmes 2008; Wardhaugh 2009), IS stands outs as unique from other introductory-level sociolinguistics texts for two reasons. First, it was developed by a team of co-authors currently situated in South Africa, the United States, and the United Kingdom, which means the book tends to focus on discussion and presentation drawn from a broader variety of research perspectives than other texts tend to use. Second, in defining the term sociolinguistics, the authors ultimately draw on a definition that includes aspects of both variationist sociolinguistics and the sociology of language. Although other textbooks typically include one or two chapters dedicated to the sociology of language as a way of attempting to include material drawn from this research paradigm, IS utilizes this expanded definition throughout the text, and this joint perspective makes for a distinctive and novel presentation of the material.
IS contains a total of thirteen chapters. Each chapter builds successively on previous chapters, making for a complementary set of readings that are both engaging and thought provoking for the reader. Chapter lengths range between twenty-eight and forty pages, with an average length of thirty-two pages, making the book well suited to use in the undergraduate classroom.
The opening chapters (Chs. 1-4) present a substantial overview of many of the core issues and foundational concepts usually discussed in introductory-level discussions of sociolinguistics: a basic understanding of societal conceptions of standard vs. vernacular language use, mono- and multilingualism, regional and social dialect variation, and a general understanding of the concepts of language variation and language change. Ch. 1 contains an overview of many of the issues that are covered in later chapters, while also defining important foundational concepts like descriptivism, prescriptivism, and language as a social construct. In addition, it discusses how speaker ideologies regarding standard language use and language standardization develop, and it provides a discussion of several notions that have...