ABSTRACT
As a linguist, I wrote the first edition of Social Linguistics with a personal sense of paradox. While the human eye sees best what is in the center of its field of vision, it had become apparent to me that the clearest way to see the workings of language and literacy was to displace them from the center of attention and to move society, culture, and values to the foreground. Paradoxically, this leads to better and deeper ways of analyzing language. It leads to a different sort of linguistics as well, one in which language-in-society is the heart of the field. So while we immerse ourselves in language in this book, language here always comes fully attached to “other stuff”: to social relations, cultural models, power and politics, perspectives on experience, values and attitudes, as well as things and places in the world.
