Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society, Fourth Edition

This is a classic book on a fascinating subject. Peter Trudgill examines the close link between language and society and the many factors that influence the way we speak. These range from gender, environment, age, race, class, region and politics. Trudgill's book surveys languages and societies from all over the world drawing on examples from Afrikaans to Yiddish. He has added a fascinating chapter on the development of a language as a result of a non-native speaker's use of it. Compelling and authoritative, this new edition of a bestselling book is set to redraw the boundaries of the study of sociolinguistics.

Peter Trudgill is currently Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. He is the author of: English Accents and Dialects (with Arthur Hughes); International English (with Jean Hannah); Applied Sociolinguistics; Language in the British Isles; The Dialects of England; The Sociolinguistics Reader (with Jenny Cheshire); and the Penguin books Bad Language (with Lars Andersson) and Introducing Language and Society. He lives in Lausanne, Switzerland.