Fourteen international academics contribute 13 chapters on the sociolinguistic analysis of multilingual communities and situations, demonstrating the continued relevance of the issues and priorities Sankoff identified for the study of language in society in her groundbreaking 1980 work The Social Life of Language. The text is organized into three sections echoing themes explored in Sankoff's monograph: language ideologies or attitudes towards language; ways that particular aspects of particular social systems, resulting from particular historical forces, have shaped particular languages; and papers illustrating the variationist approach, in which performance is treated as a sample of the forms that could be generated by grammatical rules. The text includes research from a wide range of countries, including Canada, the U.S., South Africa, Australia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)