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 section of part I deals with the tools of analysis of variation, somewhat cryptically entitled “Evaluation.” Robert Bayley's chapter, “The quantitative paradigm,” is an accessible overview of the VARBRUL program, while John Rickford writes equally insightfully about implicational scales, tracing their relative decline in use in variationist sociolinguistics, and arguing – correctly, in my view – that this state of affairs is to be discouraged. Rounding off this section is a useful chapter on instrumental phonetics and its grounding in laboratory phonetics. Erik Thomas suggests that the field is wide open and likely to develop beyond the current socio-phonetic interest in vowel segments, to other elements of a consonantal, prosodic, or voice-quality nature.

Part II deals with aspects of linguistic structure seen through variationist eyes: phonology (including chain shifts), syntax, and discourse. Using data from Finnish, Arto Antilla's chapter on variation and phonological theory critically surveys five approaches within Optimality Theory, suggesting how variation theory could shed light on these approaches (and vice versa). Although there are problems associated with each of these approaches, Antilla holds out hope that Optimality Theory “is beginning to answer some of the empirical questions raised by variationist linguists” (236). A whole chapter, by Matthew Gordon, is devoted to chain shifts and mergers, not surprisingly in view of the wholesale vowel changes going on in English in just about every continent in which it is spoken as an L1. Gordon's critical appraisal of the topic includes a discussion of near-mergers that later diverge, and the difficulties of establishing whether chain shifts involve interrelated or independent changes in spatial, temporal and social terms. Rather less attention is paid to discourse and syntax in variationist research: The chapters by Alison Henry (on syntax) and Ronald Macaulay (on discourse) are, however, important syntheses and foundations for future research.

Part III, “Social factors,” deals with the central issues of social variation, with sections devoted to time (variation by age groups and the “apparent time” concept), social differentiation, and domains. The chapters in part III give an overview of the most significant social categories (social class, gender, ethnicity), the related categories of style and social network, and the less-studied areas of child language variation (Julie Roberts) and the family (Kirk Hazen). The handbook format, with its generous allowance of space for individual topics, allows a more nuanced and insightful account of issues like class (Sharon Ash), gender (Jenny Cheshire), and ethnicity (Carmen Fought) than is possible in the usual journal article or monograph focusing on language per se. The chapter on style (Natalie Schilling-Estes) seems to go beyond the confines of the variationist paradigm in its espousal of postmodernist conceptions that rely partly on Bakhtin and on recent updates by Alan Bell on the nuances of “audience design.” These analyses do not take the vernacular as the starting point of analysis. Schilling-Estes's insight that “stylistic variation is a powerful tool for social change” (392) seems a promising avenue for future investigation, especially in urban third-world settings. Sharon Ash's chapter on social class undertakes a much more detailed and robust analysis of the topic than is typically found in the variationist literature.

The subsection on domains has five chapters, covering well-established topics like social networks and speech community, as well as two newer ones on the family (Kirk Hazen) and communities of practice (Miriam Meyerhoff). The latter two are understandably somewhat tentative. Hazen dwells on a paradox: Why should the family be the focus of so much sociolinguistic interaction, yet have an apparently negligible influence on sociolinguistic variation and change (henceforth LVC)? Meyerhoff analyzes communities of practice (COP) as a subset of a speech community, defined in terms of the members' subjective experience of the boundaries between their community and that of others. The COP concept focuses on the mutual engagements of members of the subset: Practices emerge in the course of their mutual endeavors. This aspect of LVC studies is of wider interest to anthropologists and sociologists attempting to capture postmodern moments evident in ethnic and gender “crossing.” In addition to citing the well-known work of Eckert and Rampton, Meyerhoff includes a discussion of crossing in the teenage hip-hop culture in New York (Cutler 1996) and among high school students in Los Angeles (Fought 1999). Peter Patrick's survey of the concept of speech community is a detailed one, doing justice to the complexity of a seemingly straightforward term. His conclusion is salutary: “We ought not to assume that speech communities exist as predefined entities waiting to be researched or identify them with folk notions, but see them as objects constituted by the researcher's gaze and the questions we ask” (593). The section on language contact is a short one, containing three well-chosen topics: space and spatial diffusion (David Britain), linguistic outcomes of language contact (Gillian Sankoff), and koineization and accommodation (Paul Kerswill).

The title of the final section, “Language and societies,” perhaps promises more than it delivers. Peter Trudgill's innovative account of linguistic and social typology looks at LVC in high-contact and low-contact communities and, accordingly, might have gone better in the previous section. Sali Tagliamonte's chapter deals with the comparative study of dialect, stressing how constraint hierarchies in variationist analyses provide important tools for meaningful dialect comparisons and for comparative sociohistorical work on dialects. The final chapter deals with language death and dying (Walt Wolfram), a topic not traditionally associated with the variationist paradigm. Like Trudgill's article, this might have fitted better in the section on language contact. And the section on language contact, it must be said, fits less easily into this collection than the more overtly LVC chapters in the handbook. In this regard, the handbook does not dispel the qualms that many third-world scholars have about the way that the LVC ethos of the Western metropolises does not really resonate in their relatively nonstratified, rural, or multilingual settings.

In conclusion, this is an impressive handbook, which does justice to a central school within sociolinguistics in a way that no previous collection has. It is well edited, copyedited, and proofread (typos are few, and examples of bad style even fewer). It will stand for some time as the scholarly reference in the field, an indispensable resource to students and researchers. The editors and publishers are to be congratulated.