Cuevas Alonso, M. & C. Bleorţu (2013), “Review J. L. Blas Arroyo (2005), Sociolingüística del español: desarrollos y perspectivas en el estudio de la lengua española en contexto social” (Madrid: Cátedra, 784 páginas), Language, ISSN 0097-8507; E-ISSN: 1535-0665

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Review of Sociolingüística del español: Desarrollos y perspectivas en el estudio de la lengua española en contexto social

posted October 6th, 2013

Sociolingüística del español: Desarrollos y perspectivas en el estudio de la lengua española en contexto social. By José Luis Blas-Arroyo. Madrid: Cátedra, 2005. Pp. 782. ISBN 9788437622484. $51.60. Reviewed by Miguel Cuevas-Alonso, Univ. of Vigo and Cristina Bleorţu, Univ. of Oviedo José Luis Blas-Arroyo’s extensive book on sociolinguistics provides theoretical context and foundational topics for Spanish sociolinguistics. The author examines those vivid aspects of sociolinguistics that are facts only in Spanish language, which is the most immediate subject of his study. The seventeen chapters are organized within general topics and divided into six parts: ‘Variationist sociolinguistics’, ‘The linguistic variables’, ‘Social patterns’, ‘Linguistic change’, ‘Interactional sociolinguistics’, ‘Language uses in Hispanic communities’, and ‘Linguistic consequences of societal bilingualism’. The first section tries to define more closely the core concepts of variationism, providing different perspectives from which they are explored. The author also tackles the dimension of the linguistic variable, which might be very difficult partly because there are different definitions already in existence. Furthermore, with the aim of covering the main areas of research in this field, B provides warranted theories of phonetics, phonology, morphology, and syntactic variation. The social patterns receive their main treatment in the second part of the book. In particular, B examines how the social constraints have an impact on linguistic variation from a broad perspective, including factors such as sex, sociocultural background of the interlocutors, and age. Language variation is seen as inextricably linked to these patterns; they actively constrain it. The third part is dedicated to linguistic change in its various guises. B discusses two types of approaches: William Labov’s model, which has widely applied to a large area of sociolinguistic studies and those that attempted to go further. The following part of this book deals with interactional sociolinguistics. The author starts by considering the range of discourse and conversation differences which can be analyzed on multiple linguistic dimensions. Moving away from the approaches to interactional sociolinguistics, B also concentrates on linguistic attitudes of individuals. The final contributions to this book focus on multilingualism, societal bilingualism, diglossia, and language distribution across Hispanic countries which might lead to linguistic differences. These can happen for a variety of reasons, such as education and official language status. Taken as a whole, this book is a truly original guide to understanding the dynamics of Spanish linguistic variation. eLanguage is a service provided by the Linguistic Society of America and hosted at Heinrich-HeineUniversität Düsseldorf.

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