The handbook of sociolinguistics Ed. by Florian Coulmas (review)

REVIEWS379 Cheng, Chao-Ming. 1992. Lexical access in Chinese; Evidence from automatic activation of phonological information. Language processing in Chinese, ed. by H. C Chen and Ovid J L. Tzeng, 67-91. Amsterdam : Elsevier. DeFrancis, John. 1977. Colonialism and language policy in Viet Nam. The Hague: Mouton. -----. 1984. The Chinese language: Fact and fantasy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Horodeck, Richard Alan. 1987. The role of sound in reading and writing Kanji. Ithaca, NY: Cornell dissertation. Matsunaga, Sachiko. 1994. The linguistic and psycholinguistic nature of kanji- Do kanji represent and trigger only meanings? Honolulu: University of Hawaii dissertation. Unger, J. Marshall. 1996. Literacy and script reform in occupation Japan: Reading between the lines New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press Department of Chinese, Translation and Linguistics City University of Hong Kong 83 Tat Chee Avenue Kowloon Hong Kong [CTMERBA@cityu.edu.hk] The handbook of sociolinguistics. Ed. by Florian Coulmas. (Blackwell handbooks in linguistics 4.) Oxford & Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996. Pp. x, 532. Reviewed by Sharon Ash, University of Pennsylvania This book is a rather modest claimant to the title handbook in comparison to some of the tomes that take this designation. With 27 chapters comprising about 450 pages oftext, it is dwarfed by the two-volume 'Sociolinguistics, an international handbook of the science of language and society (Ammon et al. 1987-1988), with 193 chapters and about two thousand pages. However, Coulmas's book can be carried about in one's hand, and it surveys the field with surprising breadth. While it gives an overview, it is not an introduction to sociolinguistics for students; it is a collection of essays that presuppose a degree of sophistication. Thus it serves some of the same ends as Ammon et al.'s work, of giving scholars and teachers access to a variety of areas that may be relatively unfamiliar. It also presents fresh insights into many subjects, and the papers that are true review articles provide comprehensive bibliographic materials for further research. Cs Introduction defines the scope of sociolinguistics as the study of the correlations between language use and social structure. As a general principle for the overall organization ofthe volume, he distinguishes micro- and macro-sociolinguistics, a division which is referred to frequently by the authors of the papers that follow. There are probably as many definitions of this division as there are general treatments of sociolinguistics, but they seem to fall into two categories. One pins the distinction on whether language or society is taken as the point ofdeparture (e.g. Romaine 1994); the other looks to the matter of scale, whether the focus is on individuals and small spaces or on societies and large areas (e.g. Trudgill 1992, Grimshaw 1987). Cs classification is of the first type; he defines micro-sociolinguistics as being concerned with how social structure influences speech and with the correlations between linguistic variants and social variables. Macrosociolinguistics is the larger view which considers 'what societies do with their languages' in accordance with the attitudes that affect language maintenance, shift, death, and planning, among other phenomena. He hastens to acknowledge that many questions can be considered within either framework and that the distinction is often just a matter of emphasis. Another point of the introduction is the premise that sociolinguistics suffers from a lack of unified general theory. C says that the authors in the volume demonstrate that research has led to the formulation of 'a number of viable [sociolinguistic] theories'. The connection to the development of theory is not explicitly made by many of the papers that follow, but there are some exceptions, as will be noted below. 380LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) The introduction is followed by a two-chapter section entitled 'Foundations', which expands on the themes of Cs introduction. R. B. Le Page's chapter, 'The evolution of a sociolinguistic theory of language', is a useful review ofthe historical development of sociolinguistics beginning with the background of philology and dialectology and proceeding through such matters as fieldwork methods, variable rules, social networks, code-switching, and nonstandard language varieties. He concludes with a further call for a theory that links society to language in a principled way. The second part of...