stop. start. stutter.

I'm going to be at Lunacon this weekend (say hi if you're there!), so this week's Books About Cool Topics comes early. (Disclaimer: Links to go Amazon; if you buy with the link, I get a kickback. Which I will use to buy more books. Please, allow me to buy more books.)

The topic: Sociolinguistics
The book: Language, Culture, and Communication: The Meaning of Messages by Nancy Bonvillain

This is way, way more textbooky than I've been trying to keep these -- I've been aiming more for a popular-science approach, whereas this is, in fact, a leftover from my days as a Linguistics major. (Er. My few days as LING major. Undergrad took me eleven semesters, four colleges, and thirteen majors. It's a long story.)

But for all that this is clearly a textbook, and clearly aimed at the textbook market, and makes some assumptions about your knowledge base going into it, and has the sticker-shock price that college texts often carry -- it's still a fabulous book about the intersection between language and culture. It's about semantics, and bilingualism, and cultural register, and class-structure as revealed in language, and cultural presupposition, and a whole host of cool things about what how we speak tells us about who we are (and what others see).

It's English-centric, and more than that, American-centric, but the principles are extendable. While it might not be a good introduction to the discipline of linguistics as a whole, you should be able to get by with some work on Wikipedia if you run into a concept that you're not familiar with, and the neat bits are worth it.