In this book, Vincent Remillard & Karen Williams give an insightful overview of some fundamental principles and concepts in pragmatics and sociolinguistics. Written like a textbook for readers who are new to linguistics, it enables readers to get a grasp of concepts through a series of activities and questions. For example, one activity involves finding and examining authentic accounts of language use in everyday life—asking readers to match theoretical concepts found in the book with real-life examples. Each chapter comes with a conclusion, additional activities, and website resources. For instance, the activity at the end of chapter 9, ‘Social factors’, provides readers with a list of English phrases, which border between the grammatically unsound and popular slang such as It is all over between you and I. The task for readers was to ask ten people which of those phrases felt more incorrect than others. This seems to be an enriching exercise to raise readers’ awareness of the diversity of views that people may have about what counts as ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ language use.

The book is divided into two main parts: the earlier chapters focus on pragmatics, and the latter on sociolinguistics. First, readers are introduced to the fundamental building blocks of linguistics (i.e. morphology, phonology, semantics, etc.) in chapter 2. Following this, the authors provide an overview of what pragmatics is all about in chapter 3. There is persistent effort to link theory to observations of real-life language use by detailing the cross-cultural elements of routines enacted through linguistic forms in various cultures and languages throughout the book. These linguistic forms range from pronominal forms in Chinese, honorifics in Japanese, to phatics in European societies (chapter 5). The subsequent chapters 6–8 explain a range of pragmatic phenomena, such as theories of politeness and Grice's cooperative principle, conversational implicature and the ensuing communication maxims, which interlocutors tend to abide by (albeit unconsciously) in order for successful communication to take place under most circumstances.

In the remaining chapters of the book, the authors cover a range of issues that lie at the heart of sociolinguistics such as how social identity, ethnicity, culture, and politics may influence individuals’ choices of which language to use and in what forms. The authors introduce sociolinguistics as mainly concerned with describing and accounting for various phenomena regarding actual language use amongst individuals and societies, particularly when authorities such as schools and policy-makers impose certain rules about which (forms of) languages are appropriate to be used in a particular context. This leads naturally to a discussion about dialects, debates about the concept of ‘standard’ language, and the ambiguities in differentiating between language and dialect. The book ends with a chapter discussing how men and women use language differently and another chapter about bilingualism.

This book offers well thought-out questions, activities and resources for the self-taught and plenty of opportunities for fruitful interaction in classes. Thus, it can be a useful resource for both students and teachers.