This title is a new collection in the Routledge Critical Concepts in Linguistics series. In six volumes, it provides a critical synthesis of the key ideas, findings, methods, and approaches that make up the interdisciplinary field of sociolinguistics. It includes both classic texts and contemporary, state-of-the-art research, with a bias towards the latter. The editors aver that the collection 'will stand as an articulation of "the New Sociolinguistics" as it is emerging through a sustained reflexive reassessment of the field which is now ongoing, set against a core of classic texts'. Fully indexed and with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editors, Sociolinguistics is an essential work of reference and is destined to be welcomed by scholars and students alike as a vital one-stop research resource.