Raciolinguistics is an ambitious volume that aims to both deepen and expand scholarly conversations about issues at the intersection of language and race. From the outset, it is clear that editors H. Samy Alim, John R. Rickford, & Arnetha F. Ball have set out to change the way that both linguists and the public conceptualize the relationship between language and race. This volume is formative in bringing cross-disciplinary ethnolinguistic research into the twenty-first century.

In the book's introduction, ‘Introducing raciolinguistics: Racing language and languaging race in hyperracial times’, Alim presents the reader with a new field of study, one related to sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology, as well as other fields such as education. This new field—raciolinguistics—as defined by Alim, aims to ‘view race through the lens of language and vice versa—in order to gain a better understanding of language and the process of racialization’ (1–2). In order to make clearer what is meant by raciolinguistics, Alim starts with a discussion of Barack Obama, an individual who is well known for prompting discussions of both racial and ethnolinguistic complexity. Previously, in his Reference Alim and Smitherman2012 book with the venerable Geneva Smitherman, Articulate While Black, Alim addressed Obama's sociolinguistic performances of blackness as a ‘conscious raciolinguistic project’. Through a thorough discussion of the ways in which Obama actively and variably constructs a black American identity, Alim & Smitherman presented us with a challenge to think beyond traditional notions of language, race, and social identity, laying some of the groundwork for the types of analyses presented in the present volume. Obama provides one tangible example of the ways in which traditional ways of thinking about ethnolinguistic variation no longer serve us in a time of dramatic demographic and linguistic shifts, and this introduction acts as a motivation for the chapters that follow, each of which encourages the reader to think and rethink about how the intersection of language and race affects social worlds in a number of different cultural and political contexts across the globe.

The volume is divided into three different parts, each of which aims to approach the newly defined field of raciolinguistic study from a different methodological and scholarly perspective. The seven chapters in Part 1, ‘Languaging race’, aim to redefine and reconceptualize race through the lens of language. The chapters in this section, by notable scholars such as Norma Mendoza-Denton, Jonathan Rosa, and Elaine Chun, primarily rely on ethnographic and discourse analytic methods to think through language ideologies as well as language practices. Through her analysis of the YouTube video in which Alexandra Wallace employed ‘mock Asian’ language, as well as the ways in which online commentators reproduced and interpreted Wallace's words, Chun highlights the ways in which language is raced locally, contextually, and temporally. She also demonstrates the ways in which new media have the potential to amplify both racist and antiracist discourses in the public domain, highlighting the fact that scholars in the modern era should pay attention to how public conversations change both scholarly and folk ideologies about race and language.

The chapters in Part 2, ‘Racing language’, aim to redefine and reconceptualize language through the lens of race. In contrast to the chapters in Part 1, which relied more heavily on methods from linguistic anthropology, the five chapters in this part contain data and analytic methods that will be more familiar to those trained in Labovian sociolinguistics. The chapters here, especially the final three by Roey Gafter, Robert J. Podesva, and Devyani Sharma, respectively, aim to describe observed variation via a deep study of the ways in which language is a resource for the construction of both individual and community level differences. In contrast with some earlier works that have taken the linguistic variable as the primary site of interest, the chapters in this section take extraordinary care to both observe and allow for the complexities of race, identity, and intersectionality in everyday life. The subjects in Podesva's study, for example, are not just static entities who are consistently characterized as doing linguistic performances that ‘sound white’ or ‘sound black’. Instead, Podesva carefully examines variables such as their use of t/d deletion and falsetto phonation through the lens of the stance that they take about racialized community issues. In this way, he demonstrates how speakers may do the individual work of raciolinguistic performance, as well as the ways in which researchers should be attuned to context-dependent indexical meanings of variation.

Finally, in Part 3, ‘Language, race, and education in changing communities’, a number of scholars involved in community-based work, such as Mary Bucholtz, Angela Reyes, and Ana Celia Zentella, show us the critical reasons why we should pay attention to the raciolinguistic variation described in the earlier sections. These authors remind us that it is no longer enough simply to describe and analyze what we as scholars of language and race observe, but rather that we as scholars and citizens have a responsibility to use this knowledge to make a difference for folks marginalized by their language and/or race. In the volume's final chapter, Zentella describes the results of an ethnography carried out in a high school along the border between San Diego, USA and Tijuana, Mexico to highlight the ways in which discourses around Latinidad at the border often erase the complexity of identities that exist in these communities. Expanding beyond simplistic descriptions of Border High and similar communities as simply English or Spanish-dominant, Zentella describes the ways in which variation both within and between the languages in use in the high school act as crucial indexes of identity for students. She also highlights the ways in which positive ideologies about bilingualism on the part of both staff and students act as a community norm that enhances student success.

The volume is impressive in both its breath and depth, and was clearly carefully curated to invite readers to use its methodologies and discussions in future work that focuses on language and race. By virtue of focusing on communities from Brazil to Israel to South Africa, the sheer number of social situations and racial contexts that the reader is asked to critically follow can be intimidating. The book does well to avoid a Eurocentric and/or American centric view of how race operates across societies, but its devotion to highlighting so many diverse voices from across the world has the potential to limit the reader's understanding of what constitutes a raciolinguistic methodology or type of analysis. As the volume introduces an entirely new, interdisciplinary field of study, the reader is left with a number of questions about the future of this new field, as well as how to go about conducting work that contributes to it.

Raciolinguistics is a welcome contribution, especially at the present sociopolitical moment, and the chapters contained within it will be essential reading for educators, sociolinguists, and linguistic anthropologists for years to come. Finally, scholars and students can reference a volume on language and race that deals with the complex and variable ways that humans deal with language and race in a world where boundaries between languages, varieties, races, and countries are fluid, flexible, and ever-changing. The chapters in Raciolinguistics provide an exciting new blueprint for studies on language and race in our modern era.