It is rather apt timing that Sociolinguistics in England is welcomed in the world of academia. The distinguished collection of authors, who specialize in the field of sociolinguistics, portrays a rich variety of studies to dig into. It is essential for a book such as this to take the audience from the beginning of the field to the future directions for research, and it is noteworthy that it has been able to achieve that and more.
The first chapter by Sandra Jansen & Natalie Braber sets the correct tone for the book as it takes the reader from the beginning of the 1960s to the present day with significant insights on the topic. They shed light on the Southern Englishes workshop, which in 2017 ran three times, noting that it is pivotal to conduct these types of workshops; as the authors put it, ‘the workshop was started to give awareness to the fact that varieties in the South of England are understudied’ (7).
Anita Auer gives us a historical sociolinguistic outlook in a chapter that looks deeply into urban literacies and processes of supralocalisation. Her research looks at the third person singular forms and analyses 10,000 words from 1560 to 1760. The chapter by Anne Fabricius takes a societal context approach to looking at the social, linguistics, and sociolinguistic change in received pronunciation using mixed method design. An interesting finding from her research revealed that the -s suffix is the local variant in the northern centres of Durham and Lancaster (24).
Readers will be interested in chapter 7 by Adam Schembri, Rose Stamp, Jordan Fenlon, & Kearsy Cormier, who have given the field cutting-edge research on British Sign Language (BSL) that highlights its variation and change in varieties. Their study used samples from eights sites across the UK: Belfast, Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, London, Manchester, and Newcastle (171) with a total of 249 participants. One of the interesting findings revealed that signs ‘six’ and ‘nine’ represented the most common variants in Birmingham and London.
The final chapter takes a different turn and gives a phonetics and phonology perspective. The authors, Claire Nance, Sam Kirkham, & Eve Groarke look at intonation in varieties of English. Their study found that ‘a parameter along which intonation varies is in speech context or style in the Labovian sense’ (278). The researchers have also taken into account social context such as the speaker gender and individual variations (282).
Sociolinguistics in England includes key terms in each chapter that have been explained comprehensively using crucial examples or extracts for the reader to create vividness in the mind. The editors should be applauded for bringing together such intellectuals in the field who have paved the way for future studies to be conducted not only in Europe but to be replicated in other parts of the world as well.
