Publisher's Synopsis
Since it first appeared more than ten years ago, Ronald Wardhaugh′s Introduction to Sociolinguistics has been an immensely popular choice of textbook for courses in sociolinguistics and the sociology of language. This third edition retains the basic structure of the original, but incorporates a wealth of new material reflecting the progress of the field since the start of the 1990s.
In particular, the coverage of pidgins and creoles, code switching, sociolinguistic variation, language change, discourse analysis and of language and gender have been considerably revised and extended, with coverage of some 150 recent books or papers.