Change, Chance, and Optimality Book

Looking at (socio)linguistic questions thru a more cultural studies lens. Hard to get into. Influenced by Foucault and Bakhtin but they don't pop up a lot in the text.

Update: finished reading/skimming. An interesting historical look at evolving concepts of 'standard English' from the 18th century to the late 20th in Great Britain. I don't know if I missed something, but it looks like early on, linguists and philologists were OK with saying "it's just what educated people use" which somehow became reified by the 20th century, where 'regular people' were content to see it as an objective reality. I could be misreading it though. Linguists still see it as a problematic concept but it has great currency in popular political and media discourse.