Book review : Ruth Wodak, Barbara Johnstone and Paul Kerswill (eds), The Sage Handbook of Sociolinguistics

The SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics is a collection of articles that provide a comprehensive and up-to-date picture of the established field of sociolinguistics. As the editors claim, sociolinguistics is believed to have originated in the 1960s and 1970s in a period when sociologists, anthropologists and linguists aroused their interest in an attempt to find some relations between language and society. This handbook is divided into six parts and consists of an introduction, in which the editors have made a successful attempt to ‘redefine the field’ (p. 1), and 39 chapters.