Review of Problems in the sociology of language in contemporary American linguistics, by A. Schweizer

The scope of this book is indeed as restricted as the title suggests. Only four topics are treated: linguistic relativism, social differentiation of languages (looking primarily at diglossia and bilingualism), language planning, and sociolinguistic typologies. No justification is given for this selection from what the author has elsewhere characterized as a 'vast and somewhat loosely defined field of studies' (Language in Society I,303). Russian-speaking readers presumably are acquainted with the problems to which this book is addressed. The foreign reader infers that they are primarily practical ones