As its title suggests, this book focuses on attitudes to language and dialect production, perception, and use, and particularly on attitudes to language variation, dialect, speech style, language preference, and minority languages as well as their speakers. As we know, an important aspect of the complex social psychology of speech communities is the arbitrary and subjective intellectual and emotional response of a society's members to the languages and varieties in their social environment: Different language varieties are often associated with deep-rooted emotional responses – social attitudes, in short – such as thoughts, feelings, stereotypes, and prejudices about people, about social, ethnic and religious groups, and about political entities. These emotional responses and perceptions of language and dialect phenomena are biased by cultural, social, political, economic, or historical facts or other circumstances within the speech community. Sociolinguistically based research may build a more complete and accurate picture of the speaker's linguistic behavior, in the context of its complex social psychology, as well as of the regard for language use within the community, and may further understanding of the dynamics of speech communities as well as of the subjective life of language varieties.

This approach to the area of language attitudes and message effects is not new; other works, such as Shaw & Wright 1967, Triandis 1971, Trudgill 1975, Henderson et al. 1987, Ajzen 1988, Preston 1989, Baker 1992, and Oppenheim 1992, or edited volumes such as Ryan & Giles 1982, Preston 1999, or Long & Preston 2002 have also emphasized its relevance, dealing with aspects such as language boundary perceptions, the aesthetics and prestige of dialects, attitudes toward language, dialect and accent varieties, gender differences, mental maps, dialect imitation, dialect distance, nativeness, difference perceptions, and so on. Yet new initiatives such as the work of Garrett, Coupland & Williams are always laudable, not only from the point of view of contrastive sociolinguistics, but also because of its originality: It provides us with a critical and comparative appraisal of the research methods traditionally applied in the study of attitudes, based on the authors' own research experience in Wales.

The authors claim an eclectic multi-method approach and propose three aims of the book: (i) “to provide an overview of approaches to investigating language attitudes”; (ii) “to introduce a range of linked empirical studies, focusing on the Welsh context, demonstrating two broad methodological approaches”; and (iii) “to develop a dialogue between these first two aims, to explore how sociolinguistic interpretations are both guided and constrained by the different empirical approaches” – i.e., “how different research methods produce different insights into language attitudes and sociolinguistic structure, contributing to a multi-faceted account of the ‘subjective life’ of language varieties” (p. 1).

The book contains 10 chapters of 17 to 32 pages each (along with front matter, references, and index), moving from the broad theoretical and methodological frameworks of language-attitude phenomena to specific research, particularly in Wales. Chap. 1, an introductory section, is concerned with the nature and scope of language attitudes, considering the different definitions given by researchers such as Allport, Hennerson, Morris & Fitz-Gibbon, Oppenheim, Cargile, Giles, Ryan & Bradac, or Sarnoff. They discuss the main approaches applied to their field of study and its site in Wales, the research questions, and the structure of the book. Related terms and concepts such as “habits,” “values,” “beliefs,” “opinion,” and “ideology” are also discussed in order to define “attitudes.” In this sense, they are ambitious enough to understand that the study of attitudes has to move beyond the definition of the phenomenon itself and its incidence in terms of behavioral and sociolinguistic outcomes to consider it “to understand what it is that determines and defines these attitudes” (13).

Though the three main approaches to researching language attitudes – societal treatment, direct, and indirect approaches – are presented in the introductory section, chaps. 2 and 3 discuss their strengths and weaknesses (ambiguity and inconsistencies), advantages and disadvantages, with an array of traditional methods and procedural techniques for data collection in the process of direct and indirect elicitation of attitudes and attitude-rating scaling: conventional questionnaires and interviews; recent indirect approaches developed in the area of folk linguistics and perceptual dialectology; and the matched guise technique as the method par excellence of the direct approach. In the case of direct methods, consisting of hypothetical questions, strongly slanted questions, multiple questions, social-desirability questions, acquiescence bias, and so on, their problems are related to such aspects as the characteristics of the researcher, effects of prior discussion, individual vs. group responses, number of respondents, distance, uniformity, anonymity, the interactive nature and response rates in interviews (word-of-mouth responses) and questionnaires (written responses), their structured/unstructured design, the open/closed-endedness of questions and responses, and format (attitude-rating scales). In the case of indirect methods, once success is reckoned and acknowledged, they underline the inconveniences of the matched guise technique, especially its salience, perception, accent-authenticity, mimicking-authenticity, community-authenticity, style-authenticity, and neutrality problems.

Chaps. 4–9 report the authors' own empirical research carried out in Wales, applying the different approaches complementarily in the form of an integrated program. The questionnaire study includes perceptual mapping and labeling tasks, attitude-rating scales, open-ended questions and social advantage items; the narratives study involves analysis of actual dialect performances, responses and evaluations; added to these are keyword responses and study on recognition of dialects. As the authors admit (46–50), perceptual dialectological work in Wales, which would have had much to offer, was almost totally absent. Preston's work (1989, 1999) has emphasized that it is crucially important to compare scientific and folk (i.e., non-linguists') conceptions and perceptions of and responses to dialect phenomena in general and to language differences in particular: “We should be interested not only in what goes on (in language), but also in how people react to what goes on (they are persuaded, put off, etc.), and in what people say goes on (talk concerning language)” (Hoenigswald 1966:20). The present application in Wales is thus almost pioneering; in fact, some of their most solid findings are derived from dialect mapping and labeling (chap. 5).

The narratives study reported in chap. 7 allowed Garrett, Coupland & Williams to reconceptualize the “speech evaluation” or “accent evaluation” concepts and to relabel them as “speech performance” or “dialect in discourse,” entailing a significant realignment of sociolinguistic studies of dialect, in such a way that “dialect sociolinguistics will need to address the encoding and reception of dialect forms as part of individuals' and communities' total ‘meaning potential’ … Dialects needs to feature as an integrated component of a sociolinguistic theory of language in use, rather than as the focus of an autonomous dialectology” (177–78).

The findings obtained in the research presented in chap. 9 also lead the authors to suggest that “dialect recognition is part of a much more elaborated process of social cognition, reflecting ideologies and preferences in listeners' communities and strategies in representing them … The recognition item has revealed itself in part to be a further manifestation of evaluative reactions to language use, and not merely a reliability check on language attitudes data” (227).

Their own experience using the different approaches with a wide range of techniques and their findings in the Welsh context allow them to propose the use of an eclectic multi-method approach in order to observe further manifestations of attitudes, thus shedding light on other facets of attitudes and stereotypes: “We need a complex of methods and of response options that is able to match the inherent complexity of language attitudes, as entertained by different individuals and groups” (66). This general point leads them to conclude the book by stating “that language attitudes research can develop with a richly differentiated set of techniques and perspectives able to fill out our understanding of the complex subjective worlds in which sociolinguistic varieties exist” (228).

This is a well-documented and critical work, written by practitioners in the long-established research area of language attitudes, and it will be of great interest to a wide multidisciplinary range of readers in the fields of sociolinguistics, the social psychology of language, the sociology of language and education.