Mesthrie's 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 Pānini 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
Labov's (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.