The handbook of historical sociolinguistics is an outstanding enterprise for a relatively new subdiscipline that emerged roughly three decades ago. The handbook encompasses a series of exceptional critical analyses of relevant topics, ideas, and constructs connected to historical linguistics.

The volume begins with a preface by Teresa Fanego and an introduction by the editors themselves, followed by five comprehensive sections with thirty-five chapters in total. Inside we find classic theoretical frameworks (Part 1), more modern empirical approaches (Part 2), linguistic and sociodemographic variables (Part 3), language contact and change (Part 4), and attitudes and ideology (Part 5). Many of the contributions take either a Labovian approach, especially appealing to social class, or a social network approach, thus providing conceptual coherence to the volume.

Parts 1 and 2 set out the nuts and bolts of the field. Among the basic tenets propounded in the volume, we can highlight William Labov's historical paradox (chapter 2) and his Observer's Paradox (chapter 7). In chapter 2, ‘Historical sociolinguistics: Origins, motivations, and paradigms’ by Terttu Nevalainen & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, a call is made for informational maximalism, that is, the use of variegated sources and different dialects, registers, languages, and styles to document the language of the past. In chapter 4, Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy & Natalie Schilling discuss obstacles in studying diachronic language change, including representativeness, empirical validity, authenticity, authorship, and the dominance of and focus on a standard language in historical studies. These authors also attribute the growth of sociohistorical accounts of languages from across the world to Labov's classic call for the ‘best use of bad data’ (Principles of linguistic change, vol. 1: Internal factors, 1994:11). The volume reviewed here partially answers that call.

Parts 3 and 4 assign a pre-eminent role to social networks and private letters. The former are described as an important descriptive tool in studies of language change. Social networks are thought of as the conduit of changes from below (chapters 5, 8, 15, 17, 18, 19, and 34). The covert prestige of the lower social ranks and the roles of early adopters, opinion leaders and innovators are also discussed. Private correspondence is viewed by researchers throughout the volume (chapters 7, 9, 17, 25, and 28) as the closest testimony of historical speech. Out of women's written production in the past, letters are viewed as the most representative of all in terms of social and linguistic features. In chapter 9, ‘The use of private letters and diaries in sociolinguistic investigation’, Stephan Elspass acknowledges the fact that sources of spoken language from different times of history are to be best found in the private production of semiliterate writers.

Part 5, ‘Attitudes to language’, discusses, inter alia, the notions of purism (chapter 33) and stigmatization (chapters 13 and 34). The concept of the relations and environment of languages is similarly discussed, based on Einar Ingvald Haugen's The ecology of language (1972), in chapters 5 and 34. Other chapters add a perspective on linguistic ideology by discussing prescriptivism (chapters 11, 12, 14, and 21) and vernacularization (chapters 8, 28, and 35).