This volume brings together fifteen papers devoted to the social aspects of language variation. Gitte Kristiansen and René Dirven open the introduction by explaining the rationale of the inevitable union of Cognitive Linguistics (hereafter CL) and sociolinguistics and characterizing this new interdisciplinary strand as having three features: exploring linguistic variation of a social origin, drawing on the CL theoretical framework, and implementing empirical methods.

Part 1 examines semantic and lectal variation. Dirk Geeraerts compares the notions of prototype and stereotype, and proposes a new socio-semantic model integrating three semantic forces: cooperation, authority and competition. Gitte Kristiansen seeks to give a sociocognitive account of style-shifting in lectal varieties. Part 2 includes four corpus-based studies of language variation. Ch. 3 compares two research schools that both seek to develop an empirical methodology in CL based on quantitative analysis of corpus data, demonstrating that they are complementary since both use a multifactorial statistical model to analyze the combined effect of multiple variables. Ch. 4 shows how the variable of a spoken or written channel can be incorporated in collostructional analysis. Ch. 5 shows that the different distribution of er ‘there’ in adjunct-initial sentences of Netherlandic Dutch and Belgian Dutch can be attributed to the external factor of the process of linguistic standardization. Ch. 6 compares the choice of adjectives in Netherlandic Dutch and Belgian Dutch in a Spoken Dutch Corpus, and finds national variation across registers and register variation across nations respectively.

Part 3 is about cognitive and cultural models. Frank Polzenhagen & René Dirven examine the rationalist model and the romantic model of global languages from a discourse-analytic and metaphorical perspective. Raphael Berthele investigates the role of metaphorical folk models in national language policy debates in the US and Switzerland. Farzad Sharifian concludes that cultural conceptualizations may vary across ethnic groups that speak distinct varieties of the same language. Hans-Georg Wolf argues for a new cultural approach to World Englishes.

Part 4 concerns the ideologies of sociopolitical systems. Veronika Koller looks at corporate brands in terms of their sociocognitive structure and the ways large corporations use them to establish their identities in corporate discourse. Susan Fiksdal analyzes the discourse of thirty-six undergraduates, and reveals seven metaphor clusters that indicate distinct cultural schemas and vary with gender. Nancy Urban examines the mapping of the business model onto the university and the consequences of this construal. Pamela Morgan finds that social systems are conventionally characterized in three metaphor families: competition, cooperation, and interdependence. Karol Janicki adopts a nonessentialist view of concepts and meaning, and shows how the philosophical dimension in CL can help to deal with political problems.

This exciting volume is the first serious attempt to marry CL and sociolinguistics, both of which are usage-based models of linguistics that seek to objectively analyze contextualized meaning in actual language use. However, I do feel that some contributions are atypical of the new strand. The CL flavor is too strong in the volume, so the book might be better named Social-cultural CL. Still, it provides a hopeful direction.