Concise encyclopedia of sociolinguistics.

Mesthrieʹs Concise encyclopedia of sociolinguistics (hereafter, CESO) is a newly edited, condensed, and updated offshoot of the Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, originally published in ten volumes in 1993. This laudable volume aims to “give a comprehensive overview of the main topics in an important branch of language study, generally known as Sociolinguistics” (p. 1). As theoretical background, the branch is traced from the Sanskrit scholar Panini to more recent origins in historical linguistics, anthropology, rural dialectology, and the study of mixed languages. The field is further presented as the most proper of all branches for language study today, as Mesthrie – updating Labovʹs (1972) famous claim about the implications of the term SOCIOlinguistics – writes that “having ‘human communication’ as part of the definition of language makes it impossible to study language comprehensively without due regard to social contexts of speech” (1). CESO is an attempt to catalog the relevant components of those social contexts.