Charles A. Ferguson, Sociolinguistic perspectives: Papers on language in society, 1959–1994. Ed. by Thom Huebner. (Oxford studies in sociolinguistics.) Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. vii, 348. Hb $75.00, pb $35.00.

Abstract

This collection of Ferguson's articles brings together his research over four decades. When Ferguson started writing about topics related to language and society, the term “sociolinguistics” was barely used and had no recognized status as a field of inquiry. Today, the term seems too diffuse for all the strands of specialization that range from the examination of micro-socio-phonetic detail to the consideration of broad-based macro-sociological and linguistic institutions. Perhaps better than those of any other individual scholar, Ferguson's research interests reflect the breadth of the field. His topics of study have ranged “from Arabic linguistics to applied linguistics, from child language acquisition to language planning, from language and religion to language universals, from Bengali syntax to American sports announcer talk” (p. 3). His impact on the field is undeniable; but because of his expansive interests in an age of increasingly (and sometimes myopic) specialization, few readers are familiar with the full range of sociolinguistic topics that bear this scholar's mark. In Huebner's selection of articles, Ferguson's overall contribution to the field is put in perspective, although the collection is hardly exhaustive of his impact. (See now also Huebner's 1999 obituary of Ferguson.)