Sociolinguistics, the study of the interaction of language and society, has had a major impact on linguistics for the last half-century. However, this prominent branch of the language sciences has had little contact with the field of communication disorders. Clinical Sociolinguistics, a collection of newly commissioned articles written by top scholars, is a major advance in bringing the two fields together.

Part I includes chapters that outline findings from sociolinguistic research and point to the relevance of such findings for practicing speech-language pathologists. Topics discussed include bilingualism, code-switching, language planning, and a detailed look at African American English. Part II contains chapters that specifically demonstrate how these research paradigms can be applied to assessment, diagnosis, and treatment in the clinical situation.

Martin J. Ball is Hawthorne/Board of Regents Endowed Professor and Head of the Department of Communicative Disorders at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is President of the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association, and editor of the journal Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics. His publications include Vowel Disorders (co-edited with Fiona Gibbon, 2002) and Methods in Clinical Phonetics (with Orla Lowry, 2001).