Peter Trudgill is a theoretical dialectologist and sociolinguist who has held professorships at the Universities of Reading, Essex, Lausanne, and Fribourg. He is currently Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway, and Honorary Professor of Sociolinguistics at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and has been awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Uppsala, Sweden; the University of East Anglia; and La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. He has authored and edited more than forty books, including Sociolinguistics: An Introduction; Dialects in Contact; New-Dialect Formation: The Inevitability of Colonial Englishes; Investigations in Sociohistorical Linguistics: Stories of Colonisation and Contact (Cambridge, 2010); and Sociolinguistic Typology: Social Determinants of Linguistic Complexity.

• 1. History: how things came to be this way; 2. Prescriptivism and other useless pastimes; 3. Language change: observing and accepting it; 4. What is happening to words; 5. Languages and dialects in contact and conflict; 6. Respecting English grammar; 7. Respecting ordinary language; 8. Sounds and fury; 9. Respecting local speech; 10. Grammar: the wonder of it all; 11. More about words; 12. Origins; 13. Accent rules; 14. Respecting names.

'We have here a fine resource for students and for the interested general reader. Trudgill's explorations of vernacular language and his critique of 'linguicism' are erudite, socially relevant, and accessible.' Lesley Milroy, Professor Emeritus of Linguistics, University of Michigan