Language in the USA: Themes for the twenty-first century, edited by Edward Finegan and John R. Rickford, consists of 26 articles commissioned from prominent language scholars. The collection offers brief chapters covering a wide variety of issues relevant to the sociolinguistic situation of the 21st-century United States. The chapters are organized into three sections: Part 1, “American English,” Part 2, “Other language varieties,” and Part 3, “The sociolinguistic situation.” The editors hope that the volume's “perspectives will launch inquiries into the topics of interest among student readers, policy makers, and the educated public” (p. xviii). The primary intended audience seems to be undergraduate students who have some background in linguistics. However, despite some use of IPA and a small amount of field-specific terminology, the editors and contributors have created a volume that is accessible to a wider audience that includes the general public.

The editors' preface contextualizes the volume in relation to Ferguson & Heath's Language in the USA (1981). The current collection is not a replacement or revision of the original. Rather, the editors' goal is to complement the original, treating topics relevant in the United States today. In an effort to draw student readers' attention to the chapter introductions, the editors introduce each article separately, in lieu of introducing the entire collection at the head of the book. Each chapter closes with suggestions for further reading and exploration, including scholarly publications, other periodicals, and websites. This information gives curious readers opportunities to continue inquiry in their areas of interest.

Part 1, “American English,” comprises six chapters that focus on varieties of U.S. English from various perspectives. Richard W. Bailey's “American English: Its origins and history” explores influences that Native American, European, and African languages have had on the American English lexicon through various patterns and periods of migration and settlement. Edward Finegan's “American English and its distinctiveness” follows coherently with an investigation of the uniqueness of U.S. English, particularly with respect to British English, exploring distinctive lexical, phonological, syntactic, and semantic features, discourse markers, and orthography. Chaps. 3 (William A. Kretzschmar's “Regional dialects”) and 6 (Joan Houston Hall's “The Dictionary of American Regional English”) address U.S. regional variation. Kretzschmar discusses colonial settlements and language contact as factors leading to the development of regional dialects. Hall explores American dialectology and methods of data collection and analysis for the long term DARE project. Walt Wolfram (chap. 4, “Social varieties of American English”) and Lisa Green (chap. 5, “African American English”) explore social varieties. Wolfram discusses social evaluation of linguistic features and the use of quantitative methods to measure meaningful relationships between linguistic variation and social class distinctions. Green examines syntactic, phonological, and lexical features of African American English (AAE), emphasizing that AAE is a rule-governed linguistic system and dispelling the common myth that it is a “bastardized” form of Standard English.

Part 2, “Other language varieties,” consists of eight chapters focusing primarily on multilingualism, ethnic and national identities, and the use of languages other than English in the United States. Joshua Fishman begins this section with “Multilingualism and non-English mother tongues,” exploring the rapid loss of immigrant and Native American languages in relation to the common American ideology that multilingualism is a threat to national unity. Chaps. 9 (Akira Yamamoto & Ofelia Zepeda, “Native American languages”), 10 (Ana Celia Zentella, “Spanish in the Northeast”) and 11 (Carmen Silva-Corvalán, “Spanish in the Southwest”) find common ground with Fishman in their focus on non-English mother tongues and language shift and death. Yamamoto & Zepeda discuss the loss of Native American languages, as well as legislative and scholarly attempts to revitalize and document Native American languages. Zentella's and Silva-Corvalán's chapters deal with Spanish and Spanish speakers in the United States. Zentella focuses on the simultaneously diverse yet unifying nature of Spanish in the Northeast, and Silva-Corvalán discusses the history of Spanish in the Southwest and its maintenance through in-migration rather than generational transmission. Patricia Nichols (chap. 8, “Creole languages: Forging new identities”) explores creole formation and use as an act of creating and maintaining social identities. Ceil Lucas & Clayton Valli (chap. 12, “American Sign Language”) discuss origins of and variation in ASL and American Deaf culture and explore ASL linguistic features, dispelling the myths that ASL is merely finger spelling of U.S. English and that it is not a viable language. Thom Huebner & Linda Uyechi (chap. 13, “Asian American voices: Language in the Asian American community”) focus on the linguistic situation of and discrimination against Asian Americans, a social category encompassing many diverse peoples and cultures, with different languages, migration histories, and orientations to and patterns of language maintenance and shift. Robert Bayley concludes this section with “Linguistic diversity and English language acquisition,” a discussion of linguistic diversity in the United States, which “has been home to more speakers of immigrant languages than any other country in the developed world” (269).

Part 3, “The sociolinguistic situation,” includes 12 chapters on a wide range of sociolinguistic topics pertinent to contemporary U.S. society. Rosina Lippi-Green (chap. 15, “Language ideology and language prejudice”) discusses language-based discrimination, particularly as a proxy for discrimination based on social identities such as race, ethnicity, and national origin. She uncovers socially constructed language dominance through her language subordination model, with an ultimate goal of eradicating language-based discrimination, the onus of which she places solely on the discriminators. John Baugh (chap. 16, “Ebonics and its controversy”) focuses on the Oakland School Board's controversial 1997 resolution regarding the language of African American students. Baugh discusses the origins and shifting definitions of the term “Ebonics,” the school board's resolution, the inaccurate press coverage of the issue, and the implications for U.S. education. Terrence Wiley's contribution, “Language planning, language policy and the English-Only movement,” demonstrates that language policy is not simply an issue of languages and their maintenance, but is fundamentally an issue of speakers and their rights and power. In chap. 18, “Language in education,” Lily Wong Fillmore focuses on U.S. bilingual education, outlining and providing counter-arguments to seven challenges posed in bilingual education debates, including the charges that bilingual programs are ineffective and that immigrants use bilingual education as an excuse for not assimilating or learning English.

Like many chapters in this section, Penelope Eckert's “Adolescent language” explores language as an identity-making resource, focusing on language use in the socially constructed life stage of adolescence. Adolescent language use is diverse, as is language use during any other life stage, and adolescents use linguistic style to create and mark their identities, often in contrast to the identities of others. In chap. 20, Connie Eble examines “Slang,” a concept familiar to most Americans but often misunderstood. Language can be as much a trend and status symbol as clothing or cars, and slang has exactly that sort of social power and meaning. James Peterson's “Linguistic identity and community in American literature” explores the ways in which readers perceive and writers create character identity in writings by African American, Latino, and Native American authors.

Cynthia Hagstrom addresses language use in medical situations in chap. 24, “The language of doctors and patients,” focusing on aspects of doctor–patient interaction, including doctor-centered and patient-centered conversational asymmetry and question types. Dennis Preston concludes the volume with “Language attitudes to speech,” focusing on folk attitudes to linguistic variation and dialect boundary judgments as carriers of attitudes toward speakers.

Part 3 also includes at least three chapters that would not have been likely to appear in Ferguson & Heath's Language in the USA collection. H. Samy Alim explores “Hip hop nation language,” which the editors note, “had scarcely begun when the first edition of Language in the USA was published in 1980” (387). Additionally, Mary Bucholtz's chapter on “Language, gender, and sexuality” explores the intellectual and political history of the field, which was a fairly new area of study in 1980, as well as debates over the difference and dominance approaches to language and gender, and current agent-focused approaches to language, gender, and sexuality research. Denise Murray's chapter, “The language of cyberspace,” explores computer-mediated communication (CMC), focusing on CMC as a new site for language use, metaphors used to anthropomorphize technology, and the dominance of English in CMC.

As a course text, Language in the USA can be used as a coherent whole, following the chapter order as organized by the editors. The editors' introductions at the head of each chapter create a collection of papers that work well together or that can stand alone, allowing ease in reordering chapters to suit particular course needs. In addition to courses focused on language in the USA, this collection can make valuable contributions to courses on, for instance, language and identity, language and social conflict, language and migration, and the more general language and society.

In his Foreword, Geoffrey Nunberg addresses “a chronic American blindness to the complexities of our sociolinguistic history and of the contemporary linguistic situation” (xv), which relates to the goals (or at least the outcomes) of many chapters in this book that aim to dispel some common misperceptions and myths about language in general and the sociolinguistic situation in the USA in particular. As such, this volume can also be used as an awareness-raising text for the general public, addressing issues of popular debate and interest such as bilingual education, language policy, origins of American English, and slang.