This collection is the fourth in a series of volumes titled Needed research in American dialects, published by the American Dialect Society (ADS) in 20-year intervals since 1943. In addition, the book represents the continuing evolution of the state of American dialectology and related sociolinguistics as outlined in Dennis Preston's edited collection, American Dialect Research (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1993), published in commemoration of the ADS centennial in 1989. The current volume is a striking compilation for several reasons. First, it (like the ADS in general) is to be commended for continuing with many of the themes first outlined in the 1943 volume, currently available as part of PADS 31 (1964), which also includes the 1963 Needed Research volume. This commitment to solving research questions and completing research and publication tasks outlined early in the society's history is remarkable in an era when it is all too easy to substitute research on the latest fashionable topic for good solid scholarship on basic questions and sustained research that provides valuable time depth. At the same time, though, the current volume is not fettered by its commitment to historical continuity, and coverage of newer research areas whose importance has been recognized over the past couple of decades is comprehensive as well. Finally, Preston is to be commended for the slate of authors he has brought together in this volume. The chapters are written by leading researchers in the areas covered, and the authors are themselves responsible for some of the chief advances in the field since the publication of the 1983 volume.

Although the volume's title is Needed research, it is probably better titled Significant accomplishments and needed research, since the book serves as both an authoritative guide to needed research and a celebration of the many noteworthy accomplishments that have been made since the 1940s, and especially in the past 20 years. These achievements include (i) the near-completion of the well-received Dictionary of American regional English (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985–), with the final volume to appear around 2010; (ii) the completion of Lee Pederson's Linguistic atlas of the Gulf states (LAGS) (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986–1993); (iii) the implementation of William A. Kretzschmar Jr.'s interactive web site (1998) for working with materials from various Linguistic Atlas projects (http://us.english.uga.edu); (iv) the inception and completion of William Labov and colleagues' telephone survey (TELSUR) of language variation in North American English, culminating in the publication of Labov, Ash & Boberg's Atlas of North American English (Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006); (v) the publication of several important dictionaries and other works on slang, including two of four volumes of the Random House dictionary of American slang by Jonathan E. Lighter (1994–); and (vi) the completion of the first national sociolinguistic study of American Sign Language (Lucas, Bayley, & Valli 2001). These accomplishments are discussed, respectively, in Joan Houston Hall's chapter on “Regional lexicon: DARE and beyond,” Kretzschmar's “Linguistic atlases of the United States and Canada,” Sharon Ash's “A national survey of North American dialects,” Connie C. Eble's “Slang, metaphor, and folk speech,” and Robert Bayley & Ruth King's “Languages other than English in Canada and the United States.”

Bayley & King's chapter also makes it clear that there has been a great deal of research on non-English languages in the United States in recent decades, though much still needs to be done, partly because the ADS traditionally has focused on varieties of English and partly because North America is becoming increasingly multilingual as immigration levels increase. Bayley & King also note the important part researchers have played in legitimizing signed languages and demonstrating that code-switching between languages is not the unconscious result of linguistic deficiency but rather a purposeful linguistic strategy. Other chapters point to the important work linguists have done to assert the legitimacy and systematicity of African American English (e.g., Penelope Eckert's “Social variation in America”), although there is still much to do, and erroneous stereotypes about African American English (AAE) and its speakers unfortunately still abound – as discussed, for example, in Richard W. Bailey's “Ideologies, attitudes, and perceptions.”

Another noteworthy accomplishment over the past several decades has been the recognition of the importance of discourse analysis in language variation study, as discussed in Barbara Johnstone's chapter on “Conversation, text, and discourse.” Johnstone maintains that the inclusion of discourse analysis and discourse analytic perspectives in dialect study is vital, since, as researchers increasingly are coming to understand, all language is situated in discourse, and the large-scale patterns of variation revealed in survey studies are the culmination of linguistic usages by individuals in discoursal interaction. Also important has been the continued development over the past 20 years of studies of language attitudes, ideologies, and perceptions (Bailey), including the inception of the field of perceptual dialectology, spearheaded by Dennis Preston and Nancy Niedzielski (e.g., Niedzielski & Preston 2000). Finally, no discussion of important accomplishments in dialectology and sociolinguistics over the past 20 years would be complete without mention of the revolutionary work of Penelope Eckert (e.g., 2000), who demonstrates, in her research on variation and change in adolescent communities, that sociolinguistics must combine broad-based survey techniques with in-depth ethnographic study and case studies of individual speakers to arrive at a full understanding of the wide array of social meanings language variation can have.

Eckert's chapter is one of the most insightful in the collection, and in addition to stressing the need for combining various approaches to sociolinguistic study, she urges that researchers pay more attention to speakers' creative use of linguistic resources in shaping individual and social identity (rather than mere correlations between linguistic usages and pre-existing social categories), as well as more attention to the borders between well-defined groups and language varieties – for example, the borders between urban, suburban, and rural communities as well as different ethnic groups. This call for more attention to social and linguistic borders is also taken up in several other chapters. For example, Ash also urges more attention to geographic borders, while Michael Montgomery (“The history of American English”) notes, along with Eckert, that the sharp dividing lines between black and white communities and their language varieties may be more a research convenience than an accurate representation of actual relations between people of different ethnicities. Finally, Bayley & King urge continuing study of language and dialect contact, as well as of individuals' use of different languages and language varieties in presenting and shaping their personal, interpersonal, and social identities.

Other needs identified by the authors in this collection include continuing research on the history of American English (Montgomery), as well as the history and ongoing development of AAE. For example, Montgomery urges scholars to search for and examine appropriate pre-20th-century sources for information on earlier forms of AAE, while Montgomery, Ash, and Eckert urge researchers to give the same careful study to the phonology of AAE as has been accorded to its morphosyntactic features.

One of the most interesting findings in recent American dialectological research is that, despite popular (and often scholarly linguistic) beliefs to the contrary, dialect diversity in North America is not dying away in the face of increasing mobility, intercommunication, and the widespread influence of the popular media. Rather, large regional dialects seem to be becoming more rather than less different from one another (Ash), and even some quite small dialects are maintaining or even strengthening their distinctiveness (as discussed, e.g., in Eckert and Eble). The surprising impact of globalization and the threat of increasing cultural homogenization to linguistic differentiation demand a reconsideration of the sense of the “local,” with increased emphasis on socially constructed notions of “place,” including virtual place, as opposed to physical, geographic space, since, as Johnstone puts it, “regional identity is more and more a matter of choice” (91). Along with this reconsideration of “localness” will come increasing attention to the role of the media in the diffusion of linguistic innovations, including a reexamination of the widely held sociolinguistic belief that media such as television and the Internet have only superficial effects on language variation and change.

New media channels that have grown in importance over the past 20 years are also of growing importance to dialectologists in other ways, as sociolinguists increasingly use media such as the Internet to conduct linguistic research (as discussed, e.g., in Hall) and to disseminate findings (e.g., Kretzschmar's web site for the Linguistic Atlas Projects). Further, changing technologies have meant changing (and one hopes improved) methods of data collection and storage; and since 1943 researchers have moved from gathering data via hand transcription and written surveys to analog tape recordings, then to digital recording and the archival preservation of older and current recordings in digital format. In addition, digitized data from spoken and written sources can now be organized into computer-searchable corpora or incorporated into existing linguistic corpora, for use by a range of researchers including speech scientists and computational linguists. Ralph W. Fasold (“Language change and variation in formal syntax”) also points to the usefulness of data on language variation for theoretical syntax, especially research into syntactic change, as well as the insights theoretical perspectives can bring to variation study. Dialect researchers are working steadily to digitize older data and organize these data into widely usable corpora; and in addition, though there has been some collaboration between dialectologists/variationists and theoretical linguistics, more connections between subfields of linguistics, and between linguistics and fields such as anthropology, psychology, and history, should yield fruitful results in the future.

As this collection amply demonstrates, the future of American dialect research promises to be exciting indeed, thanks in large part to the outstanding foundations that have been laid for us over the past century and more.