Niedzielski and Preston (both Eastern Michigan U.) defend the study of non-professional beliefs about language as one of the ethnographies of a culture, as a possible aid to applied linguistics, and as helping determine the shape of language itself. The data was collected by 11 members of a graduate-level sociolinguistics seminar in 1987-88; five were native English speakers and the rest were native speakers of non- European language. Using the network model as their fieldwork convention, they queried 68 current residents of southwestern Michigan, but not necessarily local-born natives, with only a secondary concern about filling quotas of demographic subdivisions representative of the area. The findings are arranged in chapters on regionalism, social factors, language acquisition, and general and descriptive linguistics. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
