vs. hate) and other challenges of the English orthography, although his book (Labov 1990) is very widely used in schools in California and Texas. Speaking more broadly, there is only one book (Trudgill 1984) carrying the title Applied Sociolinguistics, which pursued “the application of linguistic research to the solution of practical, education and social problems of all types” (p.1). And most introductory sociolinguistics texts include at most a chapter or two at the end about applications to societal problems. One can see this, to varying extents, in the three most recent Handbooks. Chambers and Schilling’s (2013) Handbook of Language Variation and Change (which most readers will recognize as a moniker for quantitative sociolinguistics), includes a final chapter by Wolfram on “Community Commitment and Responsibility.” Wolfram’s chapter is the only one in the book’s final section, “Sociolinguists and Their Communities,” and as the only chapter dealing with applied sociolinguists, it represents 3.8% (1/26) of the book’s improvement on the 2002 first edition, which had no such chapter. Bayley et al’s (2013) Oxford Handbook of Sociolinguistics is better in this regard, with the fifteen chapters in the book’s final two sections (“Language Policy, Language Ideology, and Language Attitudes” and “Sociolinguistics, The Professions and Public Interest”) representing 37.5% (15/40) of the book’s contents. Wodak et al’s (2011) SAGE Handbook of Sociolinguistics is somewhere in between. It has a five-chapter final section on “Applications,” as well as various policy and practice-relevant chapters in other sections, for an overall percentage of about 28%. One reason for the of “applied issues” in sociolinguistics (apart from individual scholars’ interests and inclinations) is the relative status of theory and application in linguistics departments and in academia more generally. In many research universities, not least in North America, theory is highly valued, and
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