Dimensions of Linguistic Variation is an incredibly ambitious collected volume, even given the ambition inherent in any handbook or volume of this size. Comprising thirty chapters written by almost forty contributors, the text includes overviews of the fundamentals of researching language variation, snapshots on language diversity in various communities around the world, research on the complexity of how demographics influence language variation, discussions of major ethics considerations in contemporary linguistics, introductions into the intricacies of working with emergent (e.g. social media) or non-traditional (e.g. song) data sets and much, much more. The text also does not hesitate to open with a frank declaration of its wide aims, noting that its anticipated readership includes students of (socio)linguistics, established researchers of variation looking to expand into new contexts or data types, and individuals involved in the study of language technology who want to learn more about the social dimensions of language. This is certainly a diverse population of readers, and it is not a simple task to satisfy them all – even in the case of a handbook where many readers will likely navigate directly to the chapters that interest them rather than read through the book as a whole.

To its credit, Dimensions of Linguistic Variation does achieve most of its goals. While this is obviously the hope for any research project, it is all the more impressive when the text is this large, the number of contributors is this high, and the scope of intent is so broad. Indeed, the diversity of topics the book attends to is clear from its internal structure. The book opens with an introductory chapter, before moving across three major sections: the first, which consists of three chapters, is framed around the ethical and legal issues surrounding research planning; the second, containing seventeen contributions, looks at how demographics and attitudes impact variation; and the third, described as ‘social situations’, contains nine discussions of distinct approaches to data collection, coding and management.

The book’s introduction is written by the editorial team, and wisely sets out the scope, goals and importance of the volume as a whole. While some handbooks have introductions which are little more than a summary of the chapters inside, here the editors avoid this boilerplate approach to instead provide a clear statement of their intent, and a brief but important commitment to intersectionality as the focus that unites all the contributions. This is not perfunctory either, as most sections of the book contain thorough and practical discussions of the importance of coding practices which treat demographic variables as complex, intertwined and living categories rather than as independent and/or static ones. Delightfully, the introduction even contains a paragraph recognizing the academic traditions that gave birth to this text, which clarifies that any critiques of seminal work in the chapters of this volume would not have been possible without the contributions of the seminal work itself. It is an effective use of an introduction, and written within a very limited space, turning what could have been a broad overview into an impactful part of the text itself that supplements – rather than just introduces – everything within.

Section 1 then opens the text by covering ethical, legal and regulatory issues that impact research planning in projects on language variation. This is by far the shortest part of the book, sitting at only three chapters long (an issue I will return to) – ‘Research planning and interactions with ethical, legal, and regulatory issues’ by Christopher Cieri, ‘IRBs, researchers, and social media as (socio)linguistic field sites’ by Alexandra D’Arcy and ‘Conducting linguistic fieldwork with IRB approval: A suggested approach’ by Denise DiPersio. At the same time, the three contributions are quite informative and, most importantly, feel relevant to our contemporary research context wherein digital data is commonplace rather than an unexplored frontier. Even more importantly, each manages to touch upon basic research ethics, how to properly use social media as a field site, and the work required to complete an ethics application with little overlap. As a result, the section as a whole works well as a primer for students who need a crash course on these topics.

Certainly, the chapters in this section do not achieve the depth, breadth or specific detail of a more focused work such as Dörnyei’s (Reference Dörnyei2007) ubiquitous text Research Methods in Applied Linguistics, but they certainly complement it (and texts like it) while bringing their own benefits. For instance, all three contributions are more contemporary in terms of how they approach research, raise importance nuances regarding how even research which follows legal and ethical frameworks can be harmful if conducted poorly, and are written in a way that any reader can easily parse. As a result, I can see any (or all) of the contributions becoming common readings in graduate courses for years to come. On the other hand, section 1 seems the least interested in the book’s aforementioned statements regarding the diversity of its audience, as it is most directly and obviously aimed at early linguistics students. This is not to say that established researchers will not benefit from the chapters! Rather, more senior scholars simply will be (or should be) aware of the topics addressed therein. But arguably the section benefits from this more targeted approach to its readership, as it ensures that the readers who need these contents the most will find them accessible.

We then move to section 2, which as mentioned is the largest section, comprising seventeen chapters united under the somewhat vague theme of ‘Demographics and attitudes’. This organization approach is a bit unfortunate, in my opinion, and stands as the volume’s weakest aspect. While an interest in language diversity and its complexities certainly runs throughout every contribution here, this link is not as strong or important as some others which could have been used, and obscures clear subsections that would have benefited from their own introduction. Indeed, the layout of the contributions in section 2 even seems to imply a section break: the first eight chapters (chapters 5 to 12) all discuss language diversity by focusing on the use of dialects and named languages, the complexities of racial categories and/or multilingualism. However, from chapter 13 to chapter 21, the thematic thread shifts to studies focusing on forms of demographics found throughout any population or language, such as gender, age, or even political identity. In addition, the section’s final three chapters seem to be part of their own third group, as two discuss language attitudes and one examines the phenomenon of linguistic accommodation. To clarify, the content throughout this section is uniformly strong. Yet, while the introduction to section 2 argues that the point of this all-in-one-bucket approach is that each contribution emphasizes intersectionality and that every factor you can code for may be important (solid points, for sure), this bond is broad, thin and honestly links almost any part of the book to any other – if not to almost any solid contemporary research projects on language variation. By not bundling smaller sets of contributions to highlight more specialized synergies, the section limits the impacts of its own contents by giving readers the impression that they are surveying a loose assortment of monologues rather than moving through a guided journey across interwoven conversations.

Fortunately, of course, the organization of an edited collection matters much less than the quality its contents, and the chapters throughout this section show excellence in scope and substance. In particular, I was delighted to see the first non-introduction chapter in this section, titled ‘Sociolinguistics of multicultural societies: Implications for data and methodology’ by Shobha Satyanath, open by immediately recognizing the inherent heterogeneity of speech communities. In fact, Satyanath even points out the heterogeneity of this heterogeneity, wisely reminding us that speech communities are not only different in terms of what languages they use, but also of the complexity of these interactions. I was also delighted to see the chapter come out swinging with a candid warning against using methodologies which have been effective in researching Western contexts to research non-Western contexts, and how the English-language and/or Western biases which still litter sociolinguistic research are limiting our understanding of language variation (despite decades of acknowledgement within the field that we need to better attend to work in non-English and/or non-European languages and language contexts). It is a powerful, unabashed and important way to begin talking about language norms and language diversity, and it was wonderful to see that the editors felt this chapter should be placed so prominently and early in the volume.

Furthermore, the subsequent contributions which touch upon named language varieties (e.g. national languages, dialects, etc.) fulfil the promise that this first chapter lays out quite well: Barbara E. Bullock and Almeida Jacqueline Toribio write on how to research bilingual speech which draws from multiple communities and divides between contact and regional differences (‘Bilingual coding’); Yoshiyuki Asahi offers an overview of the impacts of dialect contact, which attends to work on not just separate regions like Japan and Quebec, but also dialect contact as caused by modern issues such as ‘new towns’ or forced/coerced mobility via indentured servitude (‘Dialect contact’); and Robert Bayley presents a very detailed discussion of Spanish-speaking communities in North America, which attends to the diverse backgrounds of these speakers rather than treating them as a singular demographic (‘Diversity and dialect contact in North American Latinx communities’). While there are certainly many languages and speech contexts which are not covered here, and I personally would have appreciated chapters on language variation in the Asia Pacific, Africa and/or among users of non-spoken language forms like sign language or written communication, the diversity of these contents shows solid effort to present readers with a truly international overview, setting the book apart from many other handbooks which make nods to global linguistic diversity but then only present data from (or even worse, only present the work of scholars from) Western contexts.

Within and surrounding these discussions of choices from among named languages (or language varieties), there are important and intersecting studies which focus more specifically on ethnicity and/or race as variable(s) of interest. All of these deserve praise for breaking down the complexities and social histories of race as a demographic category in straightforward language, and for discussing a diverse range of studies across a similarly diverse range of contexts to support the volume’s commitment to showcasing the limits of non-intersectional demographic labels. In particular, Devyani Sharma and Nathan Young explore race and ethnicity in changing multilingual communities, providing a stimulating discussion of the intersections of factors like race and language choice with class, age and even social networks (‘Snapshots in time: Coding social factors in changing communities’); Rajend Mesthrie focuses on how English varieties in South Africa reveal how race is mediated by history, geography and social relationships (‘Studying ethnicity and its sociolinguistic fluidities: Variationist perspectives from English in South Africa’); and Sonya Fix, Renée Blake, Cecelia Cutler and Nicole Holliday give an excellent and thorough overview of how race has been used across the three waves of sociolinguistic research to date, especially in relation to blackness and whiteness, and the importance of not treating race as an a priori category (‘Reorienting blackness and whiteness in studies of sociolinguistic variation’). Importantly, while all these chapters draw on the work of their authors, they also contain very strong and detailed literature reviews which point new scholars to a range of key seminal and contemporary texts. And while we again are missing some key contexts here, this is an inevitability for a handbook not focused on race and language itself, with the contributions wisely focusing on broad considerations any research project will need rather than the intricacies of a given area.

The second half of section 2 then turns our attention to demographic categories found within almost any population of language users. The first two chapters here discuss the issue of class – R. Hummel Joshua, Jordan Holley, Robin Dodsworth and Suzanne Evans Wagner give a history and overview of the various ways in which this research can be carried out (‘Conceptualizing and coding social class in linguistic corpora’), and Anne Fabricius provides an overview of sociolinguistic work in this area in Britian, including the benefits and negatives of major British models for approaching and studying class as a topic (‘Social class, social capital, social practice, and language in British sociolinguistics: Unravelling historical and ethnographic complexities’). Next is an excellent contribution by Penelope Eckert on the problems with static approaches to gender and sexuality as demographic categories, which goes beyond simply reiterating the ethical necessity of moving beyond gender binaries by showcasing how reliance on a simple binary can be the doom of any project on language variation, causing it to simply document existing social structures and overlook the very change it attempts to study (‘What can macrosocial categories tell us about gender and sexuality?’). These warnings are echoed in a chapter on ‘Understanding age’ by David Bowie, which provides important caution on treating age as linear or age groups as easily divisible into ‘bins’; a chapter on ‘Religion and religiosity’ in which David Bowie and Malcah Yaeger-Dror reflect on how religious affiliation impacts language use, which deserves commendation for not only its clarity but also the range of religious contexts mentioned; and a discussion by Lauren Hall-Lew and Sarah van Eyndhoven on how linguistic variation is influenced by political identity, which covers both linguistic differences among individuals of different political affiliations and conscious language choices made by politicians to ingratiate themselves with different voting groups (‘Linguistic variation and political identity’). As previously mentioned, however, section 2 closes with two deliberations on language attitudes and one on linguistic accommodation which feel somewhat out of place: Nicolai Pharao focuses on what attitudes are (‘Language attitudes and language change’), Carmen Llamas and Dominic Watt describe how to measure them (‘Measuring attitudes’), and then Dominic Watt and Carmen Llamas join together again to describe how linguistic accommodation impacts language variation (‘Levels of linguistic accommodation’). These last three chapters are well written and work together effectively, but their own dedicated section with a brief but targeted introduction would have been welcomed, especially given that section 1 contained the same number of chapters and its own introduction.

Section 3 presents a series of discussions focused on how to actually obtain and use sociolinguistic data, with a sub-concentration on using techniques other than the interview as a sociolinguist’s main data collection instrument. This section is by far the most practical and hands-on, as all the contributions provide clear, useful advice for working with distinct types of data in a way that is both accessible to new scholars and detailed enough to raise important considerations for more established academics looking to try projects in new areas. Even more importantly, multiple chapters centre around emerging or non-traditional data sets, reflecting the volume’s stated goal of covering a wide and intersectional range of approaches to language variation. For example, the first chapter in this section is a very thorough introduction by Sali A. Tagliamonte to proper fieldwork coding, and the importance of strong, consistent practices regarding metadata to ensure comparative work (‘What kind of data is it? Situating sociolinguistic corpora in context’). This leads nicely into Frans Gregersen and Gert Foget Hansen’s chapter focusing instead on how to conduct work on language change, and – by extension – develop coding practices which allow multiple sets of data to function together even when building a new study on prior research which did not follow contemporary coding practices (‘Best practice for the study of language change in real time’). This is followed by Richard Ogden and Marina N. Cantarutti’s introduction to critical conversation analysis practices, which showcases concrete ways to effectively code interactional data so that important features are not overlooked (‘Coding categories relevant to interaction’).

After this, section 3 features a number of exciting and interesting discussions of how to work with less common sources of data: Jennifer Sclafani covers analyzing political discourse and television interviews (‘Approaching variation in political discourse); Sonia Barnes and Lauren Hall-Lew detail how to use self-recordings and oral histories (‘Self-recordings and oral histories); Jacob Eisenstein explains how to use social media for data, a chapter which rightly points out and critiques the ever-present use of ‘speakers’ as a neutral term for ‘language users’ in sociolinguistics (‘Social media as a sociolinguistic resource’); and Andy Gibson provides a unique overview of song-based corpus linguistics (‘Singing as a dimension of linguistic variation: Considerations for a corpus of song’). Beyond introducing readers to less studied data sets, all these contributions also contain important context-specific ethical and practical notes that readers can immediately action in their own related projects. For instance, Eisenstein’s chapter on social media research discusses considerations relating to data replicability and how to recognize the impact of a site’s moderation practices on the discourse within it, while Gibson’s chapter on song includes background on how to balance issues of copyright with a desire to make research transparent and publicly accessible. The book then closes with Tyler Kendall’s overview of how to use and code a corpus, built on the author’s experience in creating the Corpus of Regional African American Language (‘Discussion: Balancing representativity and metadata in sociolinguistic corpora’).

In terms of organization, the layout of section 3 feels more complementary than section 2, as each contribution builds on the one before it. Nevertheless, the overall position of the section and its contents remains difficult to reconcile. For instance, the in-depth ethics discussions of several chapters would align better with the book’s first section, especially given its short length, with some even referencing earlier areas of the book directly. Another issue lies in reading about how to conduct research after presenting research which has already been completed, which creates a sequencing that may seem somewhat counterintuitive.

All in all, though, the thematic structure of Dimensions of Linguistic Variation is the only real criticism I have. If I were to dig deep, I suppose I could also flag that some chapters use terminology which I would consider a bit advanced or difficult to parse given the volume’s inclusion of early scholars and students as a target audience, although the rare occurrences of this problem are mitigated by all chapters including accessible summaries, many via succinct bullet-points. Indeed, I should stress that if ‘maybe the chapters should be in a different order’ is the strongest criticism I can make of an almost 600-page volume, then it is an incredibly strong volume. It is of course much easier to nitpick a work of this size than to produce one, especially one which both sets out to achieve ambitious goals and actually accomplishes them. The contributions throughout Dimensions of Linguistic Variation show earnest commitments to highlighting and explaining the complexities and intersectional relationships of the categories we code individuals and speech into, and the book mostly puts its money where its mouth is in terms of moving outside both Eurocentric and speech-focused sociolinguistic practices. While I think the text is, ultimately, more aimed at newer scholars than established ones despite its claims of a wide intended readership, there is not a single chapter in it that I read without giving my highlighter a substantial workout. This book is an accomplishment all of its editors and authors should feel proud of, and I can see many chapters becoming staples in a variety of university linguistics courses at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Indeed, due to the overall clarity of the writing, I would be surprised if quotes from this text do not become commonplace in peer-reviewed research over the next years. Dimensions of Linguistic Variation is a strong, up-to-date and very welcome contribution to work on language variation which encourages us to challenge our assumptions on what a ‘good study’ looks like, embrace the inherent snarls that appear when unpacking the links between language and identity, and even reach outside the norms of data collection. A strong recommend, especially for supervisors or instructors who can guide students through the best order to access the chapters that will be of immediate interest to them.