What the hell happened to my review? I has a sad. Anyway, this challenges the reductive view of social class linguists all seem to unproblematically swallow (and, implicitly, the simplistic view of language variation held by many non-linguists) by investigating the way sex/gender and class-based approaches to variation are intrinsically incomplete and exclusionary, and then proposes as an alternative to class, a notion of "network" - who do you spend time with? In what relationship? How frequently? How many other people? - that updates the sociological language of class based on money and ill-conceived notions of prestige, and makes class/network a functioning 21st-century concept in ways that go far beyond linguistics. And that's just the Romaine article, which,

NB, I USED FOR READING GROUP. DID NOT READ THE WHOLE BOOK. ( )