The international Phonologie du français contemporain (PFC) project, created in 1999 by Jacques Durand, Bernard Laks, and Chantal Lyche, aims to document as many varieties of French as possible using a common research protocol that ensures that comparable speech samples are elicited. While the project originally focused on phonetic and phonological aspects of the various dialects spoken by native speakers, it has over time expanded to incorporate syntax, sociolinguistics, and second language speakers. The edited volume published by Detey et al. provides an excellent overview of the methodology developed by the team and numerous illustrations of the richness of the data elicited. It constitutes a timely and essential publication for any scholar interested in the diversity of French, whether based on location, speaker, or formality.

Part I of the volume (on a total of three) explains the objectives of the project, its different components, and the approaches developed to investigate the variation that characterizes the varieties analyzed by members of the project.

Part II contains eighteen chapters, of which seventeen focus on a specific variety of French and follow a similar structure. After a brief introduction to the variety, information is provided about the speaker that was selected to represent it and the recording situation. The section entitled Content analysis and lexicon provides information about the topics discussed, which helps the reader better situate, first its syntactic and discursive features and then its phonetic and phonological features. Given the original focus of the PFC project on phonetics and phonology and the group's emphasis on schwa and liaison, the reader will not be surprised to find subsections devoted to each of these topics. Each chapter closes with a transcription of the analyzed excerpt. The last chapter in Part II presents a multimodal study of a meeting in Paris.

Part III focuses specifically on inter- and intra-speaker variation and is divided into two subparts. The first describes the methodologies developed to analyze variation at the segmental level, the schwa level, the liaison level, and the prosodic level, as well as the tools used for approaching variation in the PFC. The second subpart illustrates the results obtained in eight different communities, seven of them involving native speakers. The book closes with two appendices that provide instructions for using the companion site, the text and word list used for data collection. The extensive 50-page-long bibliography constitutes a very useful resource for any reader who wants to obtain additional information on the varieties and/or structures discussed in the volume, and the extensive index greatly facilitates searches for specific information that is discussed in multiple chapters.

The companion site for the book contains not only all the excerpts that are discussed in each of the seventeen chapters that analyze individual varieties, but also the other recordings that feature those seventeen individuals (i.e., the text reading, the guided conversation, and the word list). I would strongly recommend that all users read the instructions contained in the introduction to the companion site or the book's appendix to fully realize the richness of the site and the great ease with which it can be consulted. For instance, specific sentences can be heard directly by clicking on their transcription, and, in the Multimedia Document tab, red buttons can be clicked to hear the specific examples that are discussed. This allows the reader to answer questions that arise from reading the chapters. For instance, did the Franco-Ontarian speaker analyzed by Tennant & Poiré in Chapter 23 pronounce sur la plage (p. 296) as [saplaʒ] or [sɥaplaʒ]? The former answer is the correct one.

Given that the descriptions for each variety are based on a short excerpt for one speaker, the features discussed are those that are present in the chosen excerpt and speaker. Thus, the objective is not to provide an exhaustive description of a given variety but rather to illustrate some of the elements that characterize it. The focus on schwa and liaison that the different descriptions share makes comparisons possible across varieties, but the other features mentioned make it possible to discover unsuspected characteristics, identify similarities and differences across varieties, and get a sense of how different these colloquial varieties are from le français de référence. This book is accessible to a broad readership, but it is also essential reading for French linguists. There is no doubt in my mind that it is a resource to which I will often turn in my own teaching and research.