Review of Hickey, Raymond and Carolina P. Amador-Moreno eds. 2020 Irish identities: sociolinguistic perspectives

At the end of running the large international CL2021 conference online, I am reading and reviewing this edited collection at leisure. This is the way a book should be read, but so often is not. I have no specific utilitarian need to read it to inform any pressing research or writing of my own. Nor am I using it to update teaching or reading materials immediately in advance of a new semester. Although, in time, it is sure to support all of these academic endeavours. Instead, I am reading it for personal interest and professional curiosity, being an Irish-English speaker and an applied linguist. And I have enjoyed reading every page and every chapter it contains. It has taken me on a broader linguistic journey than I had anticipated and has piqued my interest at every more and less familiar methodological corner. It is unusual and very refreshing to find such an offering of traditions, approaches, contexts, and even languages represented in one volume, but more of that later.