April 22, 2011

Book 11: American English: Dialects and Variation

American English: Dialects and Variation
Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes

Ah, textbooks. Those semester-long providers of endless drudgery and dry, condescending, and repetitive information, with page after page of endless examples and dull prose, will soon be dead to my required reading lists, but here is an example of the good mixed in with the otherwise dominant bad. As a textbook, American English: Dialects and Variation can be expected to run a bit on the dry side, and dry it is indeed, though there is a sly humor that meanders its way through the book and occasionally pops up in unexpected places. Though it is not a book most would choose to read for fun and is certainly not meant for a general audience, the book is engaging and informative, with an exceptional glossary and indispensable appendix of grammatical features discussed throughout the book, making it useful as a reference book beyond the initial run-through. Nor is the prose, dull though it may be, quite a slog. There are plenty of places where it could be more lively, but the authors are careful to introduce new concepts with plenty of illustrative examples and relevant academic studies that clarify potential questions while providing suggestions for further reading. In fact, one of the most useful aspects of the book is the bibliographies and suggested reading that accompany each chapter, providing readers with a vetted list of the linguistic studies that provide the foundation for the book's assertion. This academic honesty and thoughtfulness for the audience is appreciated and echoed in the book's greater organizational scheme, which presents variationist linguistics first through a series of chapters exploring the nature of variation and its potential causes and then moves into specific aspects of variation (race, gender, or age, for example) and, finally, practical applications. These final two chapters, in fact, are the only part of the book that becomes cumbersome for interested readers, as a promise to explore applications of dialect study stalls instead on educational aspects. This follows a very intriguing (and more widely applicable) treatment of the linguistics of standardized testing, and while the information presented on teaching dialects is interesting enough for those particularly interested, the focus is too specific, too drawn out, and does not provide a fitting conclusion to the book. Instead, the authors insert an overt agenda that reaches far beyond the book's general, self-justifying, and reasonable assertion that variation is legitimate and which makes the final chapters not so much a summation as a slog. Regardless of its final failure, however, American English: Dialects and Variation is a remarkably useful and accessible introduction to variation and dialects for the academically inclined and, though dry, efficiently packs a wealth of information and examples into a reasonably slim and easy volume.

Grade: A

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