Preface; SECTION 1; Survey; The scope of enquiry; Complementary approaches; The methods of enquiry; What are the data?; The sociolinguist at work; The approach in this book; The ethnography of speaking; The structure of conversations; Politeness and politeness formulas; Terms of address; Speech communities and repertoires; Dialect; Styles; Specialized varieties or registers and domains; Slang and solidarity; Language and gender; Social stratification; Accommodation and audience design; Language socialization; The description of bilingualism; Bilingual competence; Code switching and code mixing; Multilingualism; Language loyalty and reversing language shift; Language and ethnic identity; Language and politics; Language rights; Pidgins and creoles; Diglossia; Language policy and language planning; Status planning; Corpus planning; Normativism and prescriptivism; Language acquisition planning or language education policy; Language diffusion policy or linguistic imperialism; The spread of English - imperialism or hegemony?; Conclusions; SECTION 2; Readings; SECTION 3; References; SECTION 4; Glossary

Sociolinguistics is the study of the different ways in which different groups of people use language. This book provides a brief but comprehensive introduction to the field, making links with related disciplines such as history, politics, and gender studies.