The Sociolinguistics of Iran’s Languages at Home and Abroad: The Case of Persian, Azerbaijani, and Kurdish. Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan. 294 p.

Sociolinguistics or the sociology of language is an interdisciplinary field of study that examines the phonetic, lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic subsystems of language in the context of social changes. The contemporary world is not uniform in terms of language dispersion, and the experiences of nations and governments demonstrate that understanding and addressing socio-linguistic events such as massive migrations, marginalization, the decline of minority languages, and social violence caused by discrimination and prejudice requires relying on the advancements of sociolinguistics. Recent studies show that this focus has been increasingly incorporated into the agendas of official institutions in some countries. For example, the US Bureau of Statistics published a report acknowledging the need to train census officers in sociolinguistic methods to effectively conduct the national census and interview non-English speaking citizens (Pan, 2007).

The book under review is in English and it adheres to the principles and norms commonly found in academic genres. It consists of a front matter, the body of articles and an index. The front matter includes title page, copyright information, table of contents, author info, table of illustrations and table of tables. The book is divided into 11 chapters organized into three sub-sections. The end of book features an index of key terms along with corresponding page numbers. A total of 12 authors contributed to the articles in this book with only three having Iranian affiliations, while the rest are affiliated with universities and research centers abroad.