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This is the eleventh volume in the Blackwell series "Handbooks in Linguistics." Of the previous ten, one was devoted to general sociolinguistics (Coulmas 1997), making this the first in the series to deal with a specific branch of sociolinguistics. For many scholars, variation theory (including the study of change in progress) is the heartland of sociolinguistics, though not everyone would go as far as Chambers 2003 in equating sociolinguistic theory with variation theory alone. As the earlier Blackwell handbook suggests, the field of sociolinguistics is broader than variation theory per se. However, considering the richness of the handbook under review, one can understand why variation theory should hold the high ground in sociolinguistics. The handbook comprises 29 chapters, divided into five sections: methodologies, linguistic structure, social factors, contact, and language and societies.
An engaging prefatory chapter by J. K. Chambers places the study of variation within the history of linguistics, pointing to the brevity of this history, apart from the occasional contributions of what he calls "maverick precursors." The official history begins in 1963, when William Labov presented the first sociolinguistic research report at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America and the field saw the publication of "The social motivation of a sound change" (p. 5). Chambers mentions, only to dismiss, the long tradition of dialectology and sporadic studies in adjacent disciplines, and he concludes strongly that "the emergence of an international movement for socially perspicacious linguistic studies belongs incontrovertibly to the last 40 years" (6). Contact linguists might disagree, and in my conclusion I offer some qualifications about the internationalism of the movement.
The first section of part I deals with fieldwork practices (Crawford Feagin), attitude studies (Dennis Preston), and studies based on written documents (Edgar Schneider) and corpora (Laurie Bauer). Feagin's chapter, a résumé of the guidelines and practices that ensure reliable data, provides a clear, helpful overview for first-time researchers in the field. By contrast, Preston's "Language with an attitude," coming this early in the book (chap. 2), seems a bit idiosyncratic, expounding his longstanding interest in folk linguistics and beliefs about variation. Perhaps this might have fitted better in a more condensed form and coupled with the chapter on "Language and identity" in part III. The second...