I see this book as the third one of a trilogy in which I try to formulate some of the consequences of globalization for the study of language in society. The first book of the series, Discourse: A Critical Introduction (2005) attempted to sketch these consequences for our understanding of discourse, as well as for our ethos of analysing it. The same approach was applied to literacy in Grassroots Literacy (2008), and I am here bringing the same exercise to the field of sociolinguistics. Each of the books is an attempt, an essai in the classical and original sense of the term, in which I try my best to describe the problem and offer some conceptual and analytical tools for addressing it. And I make this effort because I believe that globalization forces us – whether we like it or not – to an aggiornamento of our theoretical and methodological toolkit. Much as modernism defined most of the current widespread tools of our trade, the transition towards a different kind of social system forces us to redefine them. Such an exercise, however iconoclastic it may seem at first, cannot be avoided or postponed.

The tone of this book, like the previous two, is consequently critical and paradigmatic. I deliberately try to push myself to explore the limits of the present sociolinguistic instrumentarium in an attempt to demonstrate its shortcomings and the need to revise its ingredients.