Interesting discussion of language use. The back cover blurb makes it seem like a “pop psychology” book – with questions like “Why do men swear more than women?” and “…is standard French ‘better’ than Québécois or High German ‘better; than Schweizerdeutsch?” However, inside it’s pretty technical, with terms like “nonprevocalic /r/” and “affinitive affix”. Individual chapters discuss language and social class (author Peter Trudgill is English; he notes two English people who have never met before will discuss the weather – not because they are interested in meteorology but so each can determine the other’s social class); language and ethnic group (in the former Yugoslavia, people from Croatia call their language Croatian, people from Serbia call it Serbian, and now that Bosnia is independent people there speak Bosnian – but it’s all the same language; language and sex (in English and Hungarian, it’s possible to write a novel in the first person without a linguistic way of determining if the narrator is male or female, but other languages have gender differences in adjectives, verbs and pronouns and in some women’s language is very different from men’s). (And to answer the question on the back cover, women from many cultures use “better” language than men, the exception being cultures where women are denied education). Further chapters discuss language and context, language and nation, language and geography, language and contact, and language and humanity.

I found this a relatively easy read, despite the technical details. There are graphs and tables that show things like language difference between social classes and ethnic groups. No footnotes, but a “Suggestions for further reading” at the end. ( )

Read it for class. I know Trudgill is supposed to be top of the field, but but unless this is your thing, the writing is very dense and like listening to stuffed shirts pick apart the minutia of language. ( )

Ah, good old Trudgill. Reliable, though a little dated at the edges (even the most recent reissue talks about languages maybe not making it into the new millennium).

The book is a well-written introduction to the field, penned by a renowned expert who handles the subject matter with great confidence and experience. For a text dealing mainly with varieties of English, it features a balanced range of languages to draw examples from.

The organization is not always as tight as it could have been: several chapters do tend to meander a bit, and the selection and arrangement of information could have tended a little more towards the analytical. On the other hand, by not rigidly adhering to a structure, the book reads less as a textbook to be learnt by heart and more like an informed discussion of people's attitudes towards languages, dialects, and the people who speak them.

In all, this book serves eminently as a textbook for first year undergrads. I enjoyed teaching from it. ( )

Linguistics Society