The varieties of English spoken by Americans of African descent have been a key focus within sociolinguistics since the field's inception, spawning dozens of books and hundreds of articles, many of which are foundational not only to the study of African Americans and their language but to sociolinguistics more generally. As the historical, political, and sociological understanding of the US African American community evolves, and sociolinguistic approaches evolve along with them, the conversation about African Americans and their speech continues to be central to the study and application of sociolinguistics. The Oxford handbook of African American Language makes an important and indelible contribution to this scholarly conversation, recognizing the multiplicity and the richness of African American Language, while demonstrating and calling for an expansion in the sociolinguistic approaches taken to its study.

With each new generation of African American Language (AAL) study comes new analytical foci, and this volume does a remarkable job of balancing the old with the new in a way that feels fresh and engaging. The volume is divided into seven sections containing a total of forty-eight chapters that provide a rich mix of content: reviews of previous work in the field, discussions of theoretical issues facing the twenty-first-century study of AAL, and empirical results. The authors include dozens of renowned sociolinguists as well as scholars of African American Language in other disciplines, giving the volume an interdisciplinary richness. Though few will read this work cover to cover, the book is edited in such a way to enhance the experience: the authors of these chapters have so long been in scholarly conversation with one another's work that placing their contributions in a single volume allows the reader to experience ongoing disciplinary debates firsthand.

The volume opens with a historical perspective on African Americans and their language in Part 1. Dueling chapter contributions by John Rickford and Gerard Van Herk explore the Creole origins and English origins hypotheses respectively, and are followed by a contribution from Salikoko Mufwene, which uses documentary evidence from the colonial and postcolonial periods to argue for similarities between AAL and colonial White southern varieties. Taken together, these contributions place the reader squarely within the debate on the origins of AAL, while at the same time leaving the question pleasingly unsettled. The section continues with contributions by Donald Winford about the sociopolitical history of African Americans in the United States and this history's effect on the patterning of AAL varieties, and a contribution by Edgar Schneider on the types of historical evidence we have for our explorations of AAL. Notably, this section includes a chapter by John Singler on Liberian Settler English as evidence of the historical patterning of AAL in the nineteenth century, an understudied piece of the AAL story. The section ends with a contribution by Walt Wolfram & Mary Kohn that challenges the conception of AAL as a single, supraregional variety by providing evidence for the regional variation in AAL.

Part 2 explores this regional variation in great detail, with contributions unearthing differences in AAL in rural Texas (Patricia Cukor-Avila & Guy Bailey), the Mississippi Delta (Rose Wilkerson), Atlanta (William Kretzschmar), Pittsburgh and the Lower Susquehanna Valley (Jennifer Bloomquist & Shelome Gooden), Philadelphia (William Labov & Sabriya Fisher), and New York City (Renee Blake, Cara Shousterman, & Luiza Newlin-Lukowicz). Contributions to this section include comprehensive reviews of work—the most notable of these coming from Rickford, surveying four decades of work on AAL in California. The chapter by Joseph Hill, Carolyn McCaskill, Robert Bayley, &d Ceil Lucas takes African American Language study to a different modality, exploring the features which make up Black American Sign Language. Finally, the work on variability within AAL is thoughtfully commented upon in the contribution by Walt Wolfram, in which he argues that sociolinguists' ‘ideological stance has privileged some kinds of data and evidence over others…. More critical scrutiny of how we have defined and described this variety and its speakers can only profit sociolinguistic inquiry as a whole’ (p. 348). Part 2 makes this argument within itself: it is rich with empirical quantitative results, which, taken together, make a clear overall argument for the importance of studying variability within AAL.

Part 3 provides a detailed look at the linguistic structure of African American Language. Reflecting recent trends in AAL research, the section balances work on the much studied topics of AAL syntax (Lisa Green & Walter Sistrunk) and the system of tense and aspect (Charles DeBose), with work on phonology (Erik Thomas & Guy Bailey) and prosody (James Walker and Erik Thomas). In so doing, Part 3 provides a clear introduction to the formal description of AAL, pointing toward other comprehensive volumes on the subject such as Green (Reference Green2002), while also bringing the reader quickly into the most current theoretical debates.

Parts 4 and 5 work together to explain the current state of AAL research as it applies to children and the K–12 education system. These chapters will be the ones most useful to educators, speech language pathologists, and reading specialists who work with AAL speakers in the educational setting. Part 4 focuses on acquisition of AAL, highlighting the fact that studies of child language acquisition have often excluded, and therefore poorly served, children acquiring AAL (Brandi Newkirk-Turner, RaMonda Horton, & Ida Stockman). The chapters in this section help remedy this oversight in part, providing quantitative data on child acquisition of AAL (Janneke Van Hofwegen) and variation in child AAL specifically (Lisa Green & Jessica White-Sustaíta). In addition, the section provides perspectives on AAL children's narratives (Tempii Champion & Allyssa McCabe) and on children's acquisition of AAL varieties versus Southern White varieties (Jana Oetting). Finally, Toya Wyatt provides a look at child AAL speakers and language assessment, giving a variety of research-based recommendations on how assessments can better match the language needs of AAL speakers.

Part 5 looks specifically at the K–12 education system. Beginning with a chapter from Geneva Smitherman, which reviews the history of AAL in the K–12 system focusing especially on King vs. Ann Arbor and the Oakland Ebonics controversy, the chapters in this section provide both results from research on AAE in educational settings as well as concrete recommendations for the application of sociolinguistic knowledge of AAL in the K–12 classroom (Sharroky Hollie, Tamara Butler, & Jamila Gillenwaters). Chapters highlight work on code-switching (Monique Mills & Julie Washington), research on reading skill interventions (William Labov & Bettina Baker), Hip-Hop pedagogy (K. C. Nat Turner & Tyson Rose), and the effects of dialect-switching on performance in mathematical reasoning tests (J. Michael Terry, Randall Hendrick, Evangelos Evangelou, & Richard Smith.). The section ends with a look from John Baugh, which complements the opening chapter from Smitherman, highlighting the historical approaches taken to treatment of AAL speakers in the classroom, and providing the latest sociolinguistically informed ideas about education reform measures for African American students.

Part 6 explores AAL as its use is situated across cultural domains. Chapters here focus on the centrality of AAL to the African American cultural experience, the ‘spoken soul’ articulated by Rickford & Rickford (Reference Rickford and Rickford2000). Examples abound of AAL as it is applied in church language (Charles DeBose), literature (James Peterson), poetry (Howard Rambsy II & Briana Whiteside), comedy (Jacquelyn Rahman), and animated film (Jennifer Bloomquist). The section concludes with a look at language and linguistic profiling by John Baugh. Collected, these chapters provide a comprehensive look at the ways in which AAL represents and reifies the African American experience, as in the case of church language and comedy, but also at how it is problematically misunderstood, in the case of Remus orthography (Peterson), animation (Bloomquist), and in the legal system (Baugh).

The final section is the most intensely personal, looking at the connections between AAL and African American identities. The opening chapter from Kate Anderson provides an introduction to the linguistic exploration of connections between attitudes about race and speech. Chapters from Marcyliena Morgan and David Kirkland look at African American women's and men's language respectively, and chapters from Arthur Spears and Erica Britt & Tracey Weldon helpfully complicate the connections between AAL and working-class speakers formed by the earliest explorations of AAL (for example, Labov Reference Labov1972 or Fasold Reference Fasold1972) by providing two views of the language spoken by the African American middle class. H. Samy Alim provides an insightful look at the spread of Hip Hop Nation Language, a prime site for AAL crossover into mainstream White culture, and also the source of linguistic constructions that are unlike other types of AAL.

In the introduction to the volume, editor Sonja Lanehart encourages linguists to ‘continue to push the boundaries of linguistic research in African communities to fully understand the place of AAL in our history, communities, social and cultural institutions, and our own identities' (p. 15). The Oxford handbook of African American Language is a volume that pushes these boundaries—scholars new to the study of AAL will find comprehensive overviews of scholarly turns over the last seven decades and cogent introductions to major issues in the field, while scholars who have worked on AAL throughout long careers will find fresh research at the cutting edges of current sociolinguistc theory. Through its structure and comprehensiveness, it re-engages old questions from a twenty-first-century perspective, while introducing the new questions to be answered by AAL scholars now and in the future.