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J.L. Dillard. Toward a Social History of American English . With a chapter on Appalachian English by Linda L. Blanton. Contributions to the Sociology of Language 39. Berlin: Mouton. 1985. Pp. xii + 301.

Dillard's book is a hodge-podge of observations on the planting and spread of the English language in the United States. It appears disorganized, shifting abruptly from topic to topic with few linking statements to guide the reader along the way. Persistent readers will eventually catch on to Dillard's rhythm and begin, after a time, to supply some cohesion. In the end, the book seems not so much disorganized as semi-organized, perhaps an early draft of what was intended to be a popular rather than a scholarly treatment of its topic. On the positive side, Dillard's attempt at linguistic history may be the first one that takes into account some of the enormous complexities of the subject. More readable older histories such as Albert Baugh's A History of the English Language (1935) now seem absurdly simplistic because they attempted to account for the social history of language unenlightened by sociolinguistics or the sociology of language, which came later. Although Baugh's book served as the standard reference for almost three decades, in the past two decades we have had no standard reference at all. Presumably that is because we now have a clearer notion of how complex the subject really is. Dillard's scatter-shot exposition invokes some of the complexities but falls far short of resolving them into a coherent view. On the planting of a language in a New World setting, Dillard is completely unconcerned about who settled where on what date, the standard fare of Baugh and his cohort. Instead, he is preoccupied by the fact that, within a generation or two, the settlements spoke a variety of English no longer directly traceable to any single Old World dialect, a minor detail for Baugh and one that was usually missed by others. In Chapter 3, "On Leveling and Diversity in the Early Period" (51-72), Dillard represents the leveling of dialects in a relentless string of quotations from 18th-century travelers. You can hear the riffle of file-cards as as you read. The internal-linguistic mysteries of leveling — what features of the founding dialects