This book contains a collection of selected papers from the 7th International Symposium on Hispanic Sociolinguistics, which was held at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (April 3–5, 2014), and provides us with a window into the current research trends in the field, which is clearly a dynamic one. The studies in the book are connected by the common thread of the study of Spanish language variation and change, although, as is often the case with collective volumes, the themes, scientific approaches, and methodologies are quite diverse. The editors, however, have made an effort to organize the material in a cohesive way. The book comprises seventeen chapters divided into six parts, plus an introduction and a useful subject index. While Part 1 deals with methodological issues, the remaining parts correspond to different domains of sociolinguistic research, namely bilingualism, language acquisition, phonological variation, morphosyntactic variation and lexical variation.

Part 1, ‘Cutting-edge methodologies in sociolinguistics’, includes two articles. Sally Tagliamonte's opening chapter ‘Quantitative analysis in language variation and change’ is an abbreviated version of the author's chapter devoted to quantitative methodologies in her book Variationist sociolinguistics: Change, observation, interpretation (Reference Tagliamonte2012). In this chapter, she presents a critical appraisal of the available tools for quantitative analysis, which includes the standard tool for logistic regression, Goldvarb, and the new tools (i.e. Rbrul and R) for mixed-effects modelling and condition-inference trees. The next chapter, Armin Schwegler's ‘Combining population genetics (DNA) with historical linguistics: On the origins of Latin America's black and mulatto populations’, deploys a multidisciplinary approach to determine the African ancestry of Palenquero (Colombia) and Palo Monte (Cuba) populations. The combination of linguistic and DNA data point to a common ancestry that involves slaves from the small Mayombe region in Western Central Africa.

Part 2, devoted to studies on bilingualism, comprises three chapters. In ‘Los Angeles Vernacular Spanish: An analytical approach to its indicators, markers and stereotypes’, Claudia Parodi & Armando Guerrero Jr. test the acceptability of nonstandard Spanish features and Salvadoran lexical items among speakers of the vernacular variety of Mexican Spanish widely used in Los Angeles. The results demonstrate that Spanish-speaking immigrant communities exhibit acceptability ratings that are independent of standard Spanish pressures; in this manner, the article brings interesting insights on the development of the Spanish contact variety in Los Angeles. John Lipski's ‘On the tenacity of Andean Spanish: Intra-community recycling’ presents a model for intra-community recycling to account for the persistence of Quechua-induced L2 Spanish features across generations of Quechua-dominant late bilinguals in Andean Spanish. The final chapter in this section, ‘Spanish and Valencian in contact: A study on the linguistic landscape of Elche’, by Francisco Martínez Ibarra, provides an assesment of language attitudes towards Spanish and Valencian through the analysis of public signs in the city of Elche; his results confirm the dominance of Spanish and reveal a weak implementation of policies aimed at the normalization of Valencian.

Part 3 consists of three articles on language acquisition. In the first one, ‘Children's Spanish subject pronoun expression: A developmental change in tú?’, Naomi Lapidus Shin studies the variation in the use of subject pronouns in Mexican children to find that second person singular tú is favored among younger children but omitted among older ones; this development is attributed to the increasing production of nonspecific reference, which decreases rates of tú, and the abundance of reported speech among younger children, which renders tú expression pragmatically appropriate. Joshua Pope's ‘The role of social networks in the acquisition of a dialectal feature during study abroad’ looks at how, in a study abroad situation, American students that develop bonds with Spanish native speakers present in their speech higher levels of mastery of /θ/. Finally, in ‘Lexical frequency and subject expression in native and non-native Spanish: A closer look at independent and mediating effects’, Bret Linford, Avizia Yim Long, Megan Solon, Melissa Whatley, & Kimberly L. Geeslin examine the effects of lexical frequency on subject expression in both L1 and advanced L2 speakers of Spanish to conclude that this factor does not have a significant effect in subject expression.

Part 4 deals with phonological variation. The first chapter, entitled ‘On glottal stops in Yucatan Spanish: Language contact and dialect standardization’, by Jim Michnowicz & Laura Kagan, examines the influence of linguistic and external factors on the production of glottalization (/ʔ/ and creaky voice) in Yucatan Spanish. The study demonstrates that this feature, which is undergoing a process of standardization, is the product of language contact mediated by internal development. In ‘Vowel raising and social networks in Michoacán: A sociophonetic analysis’, Jennifer Barajas carries out an acoustic analysis of the variable realization as [e,i] or [o, u] of /e/ and /o/, respectively, in unstressed post-tonic positions in a Michoacán community. The examination of social factors leads to the conclusion that raising is less likely in speakers with more interactions outside Michoacán. In the closing chapter in this section, ‘Bilingualism and aspiration: Coda /s/ reduction on the Atlantic Coast of Nicaragua’, Whitney Chappell compares the patterns of aspiration of /s/ in coda position in Miskitu late L2 Spanish speakers with those of L1 speakers to find that the former reduce /s/ more frequently where reductions can be more easily perceived, that is, in cue-rich prevocalic environments.

Part 5 brings together three articles that focus on various aspects of morphosyntactic variation. In ‘Spanish and Portuguese parallels: Impoverished number agreement as a vernacular feature of two rural dialects’, Sandro Sessarego & Letania Ferreira combine sociolinguistic methods of data collection with generative models of analysis to study variable number-agreement phenomena across the determiner phrase in Afro-Bolivian Spanish and Popular Brazilian Portuguese; the impoverished agreement system observed in the data is explained in view of a feature geometry model that favors the selection of singular values as default values. ‘The tuteo of Rocha, Uruguay: Is it as stable as it seems?’, by Joseph R. Weyers, looks at the stability of tuteo in the eastern area of Rocha in Uruguay; linguistic attitudes surveys and elicitation tasks lead the author to posit that Rocha's tuteo might not be as stable as previously thought. Finally, in ‘A corpus-based sociolinguistic study of contact-induced changes in subject placement in the Spanish of New York City bilinguals’, Carolina Barrera-Tobón & Rocío Raña-Risso study variable subject placement in the Spanish of first- and second-generation Spanish-English bilinguals in New York; the main finding, that second-generation speakers exhibit relatively more rigid word order, is attributed to increased contact with English.

Part 6, ‘Lexical variation’, contains three papers. ‘Social factors in semantic change: A corpus-based case study of the verb afeitar “to adorn, to apply cosmetics, to shave”’, by David Korfhagen, attributes the semasiological development of Spanish afeitar (from ‘to adorn’ in Old Spanish to ‘to shave’ in early modern Spanish) to its evolving negative connotations as it came to mean ‘apply cosmetics [excessively]’ and the tendency to restore the historically positive meaning of the word, which led to a more socially acceptable meaning of ‘to shave’. In ‘Attitudes towards lexical Arabisms in sixteenth-century Spanish texts’, Patricia Giménez-Eguíbar examines the question of the stigmatization and replacement of Arabic loanwords in Spanish through the analysis of novel textual sources that demonstrate the existence of negative linguistic ideologies towards Arabisms. In the book's closing chapter, ‘“Trabajar es en español, en ladino es lavorar”: Lexical accommodation in Judeo-Spanish’, Rey Romero investigates lexical accommodation—the replacement of traditional Judeo-Spanish vocabulary with Peninsular and Latin American Spanish lexical items—in three Judeo-Spanish speech communities.

This compilation of cutting-edge research shows how the field of Spanish sociolinguistics has matured to the extent it is able to integrate a solid set of analytical tools to address an impressive scope of phenomena of theoretical interest. For instance, a good number of studies in the volume make effective use of advanced statistical methods, such as multiple regression (Michnowitz & Kagan, Chappell), mixed-effects logistic regression (Shin, Linford and colleagues), or ANOVA tests (Barrera-Tobón & Raña-Risso). Likewise, the research in the volume includes novel interdisciplinary methodologies, such as the combination of population genetics and historical linguistics (Schwegler), synchronic and diachronic methods (Lipski), or the application of generative approaches to variable phenomena (Sessarego & Ferreira). Finally, the volume stands out for the wide array of approaches that are represented therein, some of them true and tried methods like the use of linguistic attitudes surveys (Parodi & Guerrero, Weyers), the study of social networks (Pope), accommodation theory (Romero), sociophonetic variation (Barajas), and historical sociolinguistics (Giménez-Eguíbar), while some of them deploy relatively newer analytical tools, such as linguistic landscape (Martínez Ibarra).

In sum, Spanish language and sociolinguistic analysis showcases the many facets of current Spanish sociolinguistics and its substantial contribution to our understanding of language variation and change.