This is a textbook for courses in sociolinguistics and the sociology of language. This edition retains the basic structure of the original, but incorporates 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.