The book, which includes 350 pages, is presented by the eminent American sociolinguist, Joshua Fishman of the University of Stanford, California, who outlines the significant contributions of this book to general linguistics.

    There are three potential audiences for this textbook. First, undergraduate and graduate students can benefit from the material presented in this book. Second, language teachers, especially English language teachers, may use it to update their knowledge of the different branches of linguistics. Third, researchers and interdisciplinary readers may find the chapters of this textbook relevant to their research interests.

    The book includes six chapters. The first chapter deals with child language acquisition. It discusses the relationship between language and mind and the different stages of child language development, focusing on the acquisition of syntax and semantics. This chapter also discusses the issue of learnability and introduces some of the most salient theories of language acquisition.

    Chapter two serves as an introduction to sociolinguistics. It defines and illustrates extensively certain types of variation in language, such as dialect, standard language, idiolect, register and accent. It also discusses the relationship between language and social context, regional, social, sex, and ethnic varieties, on the one hand, and sociolinguistic phenomena like pidgins and creoles, bilingualism, diglossia, code-switching and language planning, on the other hand.

   The third chapter introduces applied linguistics in the narrow sense, i.e., language teaching. It sheds some light on the principles of applied linguistics, the various approaches to language teaching and discusses with illustration the mechanisms of contrastive analysis, error analysis, testing, as well as relevant topics like English language teaching in Morocco.

    Chapter four deals with discourse analysis, which has evolved over the decade or so and is now emerging as an academic discipline in its own right. This chapter covers a wide range of principles and aspects of discourse analysis, such as the notion of text, the levels of discourse analysis, and the interacton between discourse, power and ideology. Concepts like cohesion and coherence are discussed and illustrated.

    Chapter five is concerned with stylistics. It discusses the purpose of stylistics and its major levels of analysis. It also deals with the relationship between style, context and function and the importance of the shift of styles in linguistic situations. The languages of television advertising, news and science and technology are described somewhat in detail.

    The final chapter serves as an introduction to computational linguistics. It presents the fundamental functions and uses of the computer and the major techniques of computational linguistics. This chapter also introduces the field of artificial intelligence, as well as the the objectives and issues of machine translation. Mention is made of the state of computational linguistics in the Arab world.