John Edwards embarks on a major undertaking in this book, looking at sociolinguistics (or what was to become sociolinguistics) over the last century from its beginnings in studies on attitudes towards specific cultures and ethnicities and their overt prestige to its more recent advancements explaining the underlying theories that connect sociolinguistic research to language development and use in society. The book covers a breadth of topics, but Edwards does more than just present the research; the text is an impressive synthesis of the growing body of literature on language and its use in society. The author evaluates and critiques these studies, which results in a text that presents concrete thoughts and a progressive narrative of the study of the social life of language.

There are three main sections broadly covering attitudes, identity, and contact, although they all interconnect seamlessly. A constant theme threaded through the book is that power and identity are closely linked in anything dealing with language and its social uses. Edwards looks at the social life of language from a variety of fields—not just linguistic but also psychological, anthropological, and historical—arguing for a more intentional approach that bridges these fields to better understand sociolinguistic phenomena and better inform sociolinguistic research.

Part 1, “Perceptual underpinnings,” looks at studies of attitudes towards languages, speakers, and ethnicities and their effects on people's behaviors and beliefs. He asks basic questions such as how speaker and hearer attitudes affect language use, or even whether they do at all. He determines that attitudes are important because they can help us see other facets of social life and shed light upon the human condition. In Part 2, “Identity matters,” he discusses how people connect language to culture and identity and explains how everyone seeks to protect that connection and our linguistic human rights even when faced with challenges to our social order. Part 3, “Language contact and its consequences,” looks at language learning and contact as a result of globalization and its opposite, endangerment, or the relationship between large and small languages.

One of the most important take-aways comes early in the text: Edwards strategically notes that collecting language and making observations is not the same thing as the scientific study of language and that in sociolinguistic research, what people say and what people do is valuable, although they may not always be associated. Moreover, linguistics in general deals with the minute, which does not encourage researchers to make broader connections to language and society. He suggests that “where fragmented, decontextualised and historical naive treatments abound, perhaps we should not expect much attention to the broader scholarship” (4). Throughout the book, Edwards questions methodology in linguistic research and is careful to critique all methods. The final result is that research, no matter how skewed, produces data that do tell something about attitudes or something about ideology. Research cannot always deal with issues of assessment and interpretation. Following Edwards' ruminations on the challenges in sociolinguistic research requires a level of linguistic knowledge and preparedness, but the reader will gain much from the exercise.