The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics (review)

A consultation of the online Merriam-Webster Dictionary results in the following definitions of handbook: "a: a book capable of being conveniently carried as a ready reference: manual b: a concise reference book covering a particular subject." The website for the Cambridge Dictionaries Online presents as its definition: "a book which contains instructions or advice about how to do something or the most important and useful information about a subject." At a price of $199.95 (US) for the 793-page volume, The Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics, edited by Manuel Díaz-Campos, cannot be considered either an easily affordable or portable, concise reference on the topic. And, it is not the first attempt at a comprehensive reference for the field. Similar in scope are Blas-Arroyo's Sociolingüística del español (2005) at 782 pages and Moreno Fernández's Principios de sociolingüística y sociología del lenguaje (1998, 2009), at 399 pages, both written in Spanish and published in Spain. However, as alternatives that cover roughly the same ground, there are single-authored textbooks in the field which have the advantage of being succinct and as comprehensive on the most important topics as each author believes appropriate. Two such texts that I have used in my courses are Silva-Corvalán's Sociolinguística y pragmática del español (2001), and Mar-Molinero's The Spanish-speaking World: A Practical Introduction to Sociolinguistic Issues (1997, 2003). These have the advantage of being lower in price and offering, perhaps, a more cohesive view of the field of Spanish sociolinguistics than this Handbook.

That observation notwithstanding, this Handbook is a worthwhile reference, buoyed by some excellent contributions in Hispanic sociolinguistics. Rather than being a "handbook" or "manual," however, it might be better characterized as a "compendium." For this word, the online Merriam-Webster Dictionary provides "collection" and "compilation" as synonyms, along with an example of usage: "a one-volume compendium of information," which is very apt in this instance. Divided into six sections, the thirty-five chapters are all written in English and favor sociolinguists working in the United States. The six sections are preceded by an introduction by Díaz-Campos (pages 1-5, prior to section 1 in the table of contents) in which he states: "The goal of this Handbook of Hispanic Sociolinguistics is to provide a comprehensive presentation of the field by including articles in the most researched areas of Hispanic sociolinguistics, from quantitative to qualitative, [sic] oriented research" (3). However, I did not find this stated rationale for content to be accurate, as there were some quite exciting chapters in less-studied areas, while others, more-researched, were not to be found. Moreover, some important questions in sociolinguistic theory are omitted, such as the implications of modeling linguistic data in terms of statistical analyses, or the issue of the treatment of naturalistic, human speech as scientific data subject to replication. But again, this raises the question of what this volume was intended to do. One approach for a multiauthored handbook could have been to commission experts to present an even-handed, comprehensive overview of different aspects of the field. In this volume, every chapter reveals a different part of the elephant, with only some of them interconnected by the stated theme of the section.

For this compendium to be maximally useful as a reference work, moreover, its organization should be logical, its contributions somewhat uniform in scope, and its editing consistent across sections and chapters. These goals are not always met successfully here. The six labeled sections are: "Phonological Variation," "Morpho-syntactic Variation," "Language, the Individual and Society," "Spanish in Contact," "Spanish in the United States, Heritage Language, L2 Spanish," and "Language Policy/Planning. Language Attitudes and Ideology." The first two sections identify aspects of sentential phenomena frequently studied as micro-sociolinguistics, the latter three sections could perhaps be labeled macro-sociolinguistics, while the third seems a little bit of everything. It is not merely that these classifications seem haphazard...