Robert Bayley, Richard Cameron, and Ceil Lucas, eds.: The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics

UC Davis linguists and Department of Linguistics alumni feature prominently in The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics. UC Davis faculty members Janet Shibamoto-Smith (Anthropology), Karen Watson-Gegeo (Education), Eric Russell Webb (French), and Robert Bayley (Linguistics) contributed chapters, as did Ph.D. graduates Vineeta Chand and Brandon Loudermilk, and Robert Bayley edited the volume, along with colleagues Richard Cameron (U of Illinois, Chicago) and Ceil Lucas (Gallaudet U).  Their contributions reflect the breadth of sociolinguisitic study at Davis, ranging from linguistic anthropology to language policy—from a variationist approach to a psycholinguistic approach.

The Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics differs from existing work in four major respects. First, it emphasizes new methodological developments, particularly the convergence of linguistic anthropology and variationist sociolinguistics. Second, it includes chapters on sociolinguistic developments in areas of the world that have been relatively neglected in the major journals. Third, its chapters are written by contributors who have worked in a range of languages and whose work addresses sociolinguistic issues in bi- and multilingual contexts, i.e. the contexts in which a majority of the world's population lives. Finally, it includes substantial material on the rapidly growing study of sign language sociolinguistics.