摘要：Although sociolinguistics is a discipline of great interest to many linguistically oriented researchers in the world,there are still only few sociolinguists who are concerned with Czech. This could be ascribed to the development of Czech linguistics in the 20th century and its primary orientation on theoretical issues defined by the Prague Linguistic Circle in the 1920s and 1930s. A good illustration of this might be an article sub-title “Why is there no Czech sociolinguistics” (Starý,1993) or several years older a statement “in principle there is no sociolinguistics in Czechoslovakia” (Nekvapil,1986,p. 7). Nevertheless,in the 1990s and in the beginning of the 21st century,a group of younger linguists (e.g. Vít Dovalil,Tamah Sherman and Marián Sloboda,or Martin Havlík),under the leadership of Jiří Nekvapil,emerged who changed this unfortunate situation. Their concerns are primarily based in interactional sociolinguistics and in language management – however,the present book by James Wilson is an exception since it is variationist in principle. To my knowledge,it is the first empirical study oriented on the Czech language situation which uses modern methods of variationist sociolinguistics..
