This textbook for sociolinguistics is in many respects unconventional, and perhaps setting a new trend. It is innovative in its attempt to have a much more global coverage than previous textbooks, and in devoting a lot of attention to methods in sociolinguistic research. The author has himself worked on standard languages, language norms, the sociolinguistics of cities, methodology, and globalizing sociolinguistics. The textbook contains a laudable broadness of topics, discussion of several theoretical approaches, and it has a practical orientation for students’ own research projects.
The book is divided into four parts. Part 1, ‘Introducing sociolinguistics’ (1–47), contains four introductory chapters covering what sociolinguistics entails and how the field started. Part 2, ‘Understanding sociolinguistics’ (49–155), contains eight chapters with topics like language choice, norms, attitudes, folk linguistics, gender, and acquisition. This part of the book covers the more theoretical part, and the rest of the book focuses on research practice. Part 3, ‘Processing sociolinguistics’ (157–202), contains practical advice for students: designing a research project, using statistics, and the basics of sociophonetics. Part 4, ‘Doing sociolinguistics’ (203–57), contains methodological chapters about investigating corpora, doing elicitation, collecting data, and studying attitudes. Thus, three fifths of the text covers sociolinguistics, and two fifths practical and methodological topics. There is an accompanying website.
The thirty-one-page reference list contains over 500 titles. A modest glossary (thirty-two concepts) follows, containing very general terminology and a small selection of sociolinguistic concepts. There is an index with place names, languages, and populations, but no phonetic or statistical terms. Some chapters are apparently not indexed.
The chapters contain, in addition to the texts, frames with some of the key concepts, such as essentialism, cognition, metro-ethnicity, as well as examples such as speech levels in some Indonesian languages or coming of age ceremonies and Focus On sections with topics such as sign language, language concealment (i.e. minority languages in the diaspora), or the size of lingua francas. The choice of these seem often arbitrary, but they do contribute to the attractiveness of the book. Each chapter ends with two to four study questions that can be used for individual reflection or class discussion, and they are generally good. There are also useful suggestions for further reading.
The practical chapters all contain sample investigations, outlining simple research projects, and ways one would collect and analyze data. The book should thus prepare students to do their own research projects. That may be challenging for undergraduate students, but in my experience, it turns out well.
The theoretical part is rather short, especially taking into consideration that the author has set the laudable goal of a global overview, and not only reporting on the English-speaking world. That gives the book a definite advantage for teachers in ‘the rest of the world’. Chapters contain descriptions of research results obtained in Asia, Africa, the Arabic world, and continental Europe, thus avoiding the Anglo-Saxon ethnocentrism present in many other sociolinguistics textbooks. English language references still dominate in the list of references, but we also find titles in Basque, Chinese, French, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and other languages.
The book outlines the three waves of sociolinguistics: briefly the Labovian first wave linking language phenomena with social characteristics like class or gender, the second wave taking self-defined social groups as a point of departure, and the third wave that sees language as a social construction and takes individuals and their multiple identities as their point of departure. The author does not give value judgments or a personal theoretical stance, and the book contains references to studies from each of these approaches in most of the theoretical chapters. The practical chapters contain only examples of second and first wave research.
Whereas most other textbooks clearly separate certain topics and deal with them in bounded chapters, that is not the case in the book under review. A topic like gender is dealt with in chapters about variables, language choice, and in a separate chapter, and language norms are dealt with in a separate chapter but also discussed in many other chapters. This leads to a more holistic approach, where students can see that the topics are connected. On the downside, it may be initially confusing for the teacher where to place supplementary articles on specific topics, when they reappear in several chapters.
In some cases, the descriptions of the topics are rather short, and in the most extreme cases, so short that they become meaningless. For instance, Smakman may mention that a certain cited author investigated some phenomenon, without providing details about the findings. In such cases, Smakman only says that a study on a specific topic has been conducted in a named country, but the results are not summarized. The curious reader can of course turn to the source and consult the reference, but one may wonder why the existence of these studies is named if the contents are not discussed. Another disadvantage, in a similar vein, is that the author has a tendency to refer to discussions in sociolinguistics, writing, for example, ‘some studies argue…’, but the specific studies are not always mentioned. The book is rich in sources, but sometimes one is nevertheless left without references.
My own experiences with using the book as a textbook are moderately positive. I have used the book with two cohorts of undergraduate students. The first year students generally liked the book, and most produced surprisingly good quality research projects considering their level of studies, including, in some cases, statistics, and in almost all cases a small empirical project. Method design is part of the course requirements. The second year, almost all students gave the book a 3 on a scale from 1 to 5.
There are some drawbacks regarding the book. These are the lack of visual illustrations and the virtual absence of language examples, which would have given readers a more engaging and less abstract impression of the field. Sociolinguistic studies are filled with graphs, charts, and tables, but they are absent in the book. There are bar charts, pie charts, box plots, and the like in the chapter on statistics, but these are just fictitious. They are useful, but there are no examples from concrete studies, even though many are available.
The theoretical chapters discuss first and foremost sociological phenomena, obviously oriented towards language in society, but actual examples with sentences or dialogues, or illustrations of variation, would have made the book much more attractive and accessible. There are no concrete quotes, for example, of sentences with codeswitching, texts in pidgins/creoles, women using tag-questions, dialogues illustrating greeting behavior in Africa, specimens of ritual languages, queer intonation, or language levels in a diglossic society. The only language examples throughout the book are occasional loanwords or pronunciation of specific words, or a word in a language with a special social meaning.
I am not sure to what extent students, after having gone only through this book, have sufficient theoretical background knowledge, or whether they have sufficient insight into the ‘canon’ of classical sociolinguistics. Obviously, a careful choice of supplementary articles in necessary. Many central concepts in sociolinguistics do not get the kind of treatment they get in other textbooks. The first five terms in the glossary are: anthropology, ethnicity, ethnolinguistic, folklore, and formal linguistics, and one wonders why these and not others, as most are not central concepts in sociolinguistics. Terms like accommodation theory, act of identity, business communication, creole, diglossia, and folk linguistics are not included in the glossary. They are dealt with in the book. By contrast, sociolinguistic concepts like address terms, basic variety, color terms, connotation, contact language, deixis, denotation, derogatory terms, direct indexing, diversity, domains, dominance, endangerment, ethics, focus marking, footing, and frame of reference are missing not only in the glossary, but also in the index and often in the book as well. Obviously, a choice in topics has to be made for any textbook, but some of these concepts seem central in the field. Strikingly, a term like variable is absent in the index, but dealt with in considerable depth in the book.
The ‘in practice’ part is the major advantage of this textbook. The problem with methods is that one cannot teach them before bringing them into practice, and one cannot do practical research before having a grasp of theoretical and methodological issues. In the past decade, some excellent textbooks and handbooks on sociolinguistic methodology have appeared. Smakman's book combines an overview of findings from sociolinguistics and instructions in doing research yourself. Both sides may have been treated more superficially, obviously, than in two separate textbooks (one an overview, the other methodological), but the hands-on approach shows that the combination is possible within one course. This, however, had a negative effect in that there were a very limited number of visual and linguistic examples from the field. One could obviously see such gaps as welcome opportunities for the teacher to fill in with supplementary readings.
