Androutsopoulos, Jannis (ed.). Mediatization and Sociolinguistic Change (linguae & litterae 36). Berlin, Germany/Boston, Massachusetts: Walter de Gruyter. 2014. 557 pp. Hb (9783110343571) €119.95. Reviewed by Tom Van Hout At the intersection of discourse and media studies lies media linguistics (from German Medienlinguistik), an umbrella term for the study of mediated language in society. Two approaches can be discerned within media linguistics. Work on language of the media examines how (news) media use language to represent social life. Work on language in the media investigates how language standards, ideologies, and change are represented in the media. The popularity of media linguistics is spurred on by two developments: the shifting ecology of media organizations and their fragmented audiences, and the proliferation of mediated communication in society. The book under review addresses both developments through a timely sociolinguistic lens. By focusing on sociolinguistic change in mediated communication, Jannis Androutsopoulos argues that sociolinguists can study speakers’ linguistic repertoires, their language practices around digital media, their agency visàvis institutional policies, languageideological change, and linguistic flows across media and institutional contexts. The book is structured around six sections, seventeen chapters, and five section commentaries. The fourteen chapters in sections II through VI are prefaced by three theoretical chapters in section I and discussed in section commentaries. Rather than summarize the different chapters one by one, I review the book the way I read it and anticipate many others will too: going back and forth between the three foundational chapters in section I, perusing some chapters while reading others for gist. Let me start by stating that this book is a hard but rewarding read. While the range of approaches and frameworks covers a lot of ground, the book manages to drive home the importance of mediatized communication to the study of language in society. In the opening chapter, which doubles as a mustread introduction to the entire volume, Jannis Androutsopoulos takes a processual, dynamic approach to language and media. This approach echoes other performative language practices such as stylization, translanguaging, recontextualization, and enregisterment. The reader is introduced to the book’s key concepts of sociolinguistic change (as opposed to language change), mediatization (as opposed to ‘the media’), the central role media plays in language use (as opposed to the quantifiable influence of media on language use), and the shifting boundaries between media language and conversational language (as opposed to strict boundaries between the public and the private). Here, the reader also learns about the five themes, or ‘types of relations between sociolinguistic change and mediatization’ (p. 4) that each section explores. 1