textbook recommendations

[Amy L Sheldon]

Are any of these texts or readings usable for first year students who are
nonlinguistics majors in a general intro to "Language & Society", which
would NOT be an Intro to Sociolinguistics?  Does anyone have any
suggestions of a "sociolinguistics" text that IS for that beginning and
generalist level and which has a strong, current treatment og language and
gender, if that's possible.
Amy

On Thu, 18 May 2000, Bonnie McElhinny wrote:

> These are some comments in response to Beth Simon's request for information
> on textbooks in sociolinguistics, w. particular reference to those which
> have strong treatments of gender.
>
> The linguistic anthropology list had a discussion last year about which
> textbooks people preferred.  The results were published by Cindy Dunn and
> Jim Wilce in the Anthropology Newsletter in December 1999.  The textbooks
> most widely used by linguistic anthropologists were those written by
> Michael Agar, Nancy Bonvillain, Alessandro Duranti, William Foley, Gary
> Palmer, Zdenek Salzmann and Ronald Wardhaugh (see full citations below).
> Note that these don't necessarily include coverage of topics that might be
> seen as more central to sociolinguists.
>
> At IGALA, Claire Hicks, Jeff Hotzkener, Marijke Hols, Susanne Unger and I
> presented the first round of results of our project investigating the way
> gender shapes publication and citation rates in sociolinguistics and
> linguistic anthropology, in a paper entitled "women's writing in
> sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology."  We've been looking at the
> percentages of women published and cited in different journals, and in
> textbooks. Of the 15 textbooks published, or published with new editions in
> the 1990s, 8 include a chapter on language and gender (Bonvillain,
> Chambers, Fasold 1990, Foley, Holmes, Macaulay, Romaine, Wardhaugh).  2 of
> these include 2 chapters on language and gender (Holmes, Bonvillain).
> Although there's another project investigating precisely how language and
> gender research is defined and understood by those often not working in the
> field, my sense of these chapters on language and gender  is that many of
> them are shockingly out of date, focusing largely on Lakoff's work and on
> early variationist work on gender.  To my mind the strongest one-chapter
> treatment in a textbook is Foley's.  I would still, however, use one of the
> chapter-length surveys by practitioners in the field instead, or as a
> supplement (possibilities include Eckert/McConnell-Ginet's paper in the
> Annual Review, Gal's paper in Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge and,
> for classes aimed at teachers/educators, perhaps my chapter with Rebecca
> Freeman in Sociolinguistics and Language Teaching).
>
>
> Textbooks Analyzed.
> Agar, Michael.   1994.  Language Shock:  Understanding the Culture of
> Conversation.  NY:  William       Morrow and      Company, Inc.
> Bonvillain, Nancy.  2000.  Language, Culture and Communication:  The
> Meaning of Messages.  3rd  edition.  Upper         Saddle River, NJ:
> Prentice-Hall.
> Chambers, J.K.  1995.  Sociolinguistic Theory.  Oxford:  Blackwell.
> Duranti, Alessandro.  1997.     Linguistic Anthropology.  Cambridge:
> Cambridge University Press.
>  Fasold, Ralph.  1984.  The Sociolinguistics of Society.    Introduction to
> Sociolinguistics Volume I.          Oxford:  Blackwell.
> -------.  1990.  Sociolinguistics of Language.  Introduction to
> Sociolinguistics Volume II.  Oxford:    Blackwell.
> Foley, William.  1997.  Anthropological Linguistics:  An Introduction.
> Oxford:  Blackwell.
> Hanks, William.  1996.  Language and Communicative Practices.  Boulder, CO:
> Westview.
> Holmes, Janet.  1992.  An Introduction to Sociolinguistics.  London:  Longman.
> Hudson, R. A.  1996.  Sociolinguistics.  2nd edition.  Cambridge:
> Cambridge University Press.
> Macaulay, Ronald.  1994.        The Social Art:  Language and Its Uses.
> NY:  Oxford University Press.
> Palmer, Gary.  1996.  Toward a Theory of Cultural Linguistics.  Austin:
> University of Texas Press.
> Romaine, Suzanne. 1994.   Language in Society:  An Introduction to
> Sociolinguistics.  Oxford:   Oxford University       Press.
> Salzmann, Zdenek.  1993.  Language, Culture and Society:  An Introduction
> to Linguistic         Anthropology.  Boulder:         Westview Press.
> Wardhaugh, Ronald.  1992.  An Introduction to Sociolinguistics.  2nd
> edition.  Oxford:  Blackwell.
>
> ****************
> Bonnie McElhinny
> Assistant Professor, Anthropology
> University of Toronto
> 100 St. George St.
> Toronto Ontario M5S 3G3
> CANADA
>
> phone:  416-978-3297
> fax:    416-978-3217
>
> em:     bonnie.mcelhinny at utoronto.ca
>