Contemporary social identities are hybrid and complex, and the media play a crucial role in their construction. A shift from political identities based on citizenship to economic ones based on participation in a global consumer market can be observed, together with a concomitant shift from monolingual practices to multilingual and English-dominant ones. This transformation is here explored in a corpus of German advertisements. Multilingual advertisements accounted for 60–70% of all advertisements released on various television networks and in two national newspapers in 1999. The subject positions that are created by multilingual narrators and multilingual narratees are characterized by drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism, and on point-of-view more generally. In order to test the acceptance of or resistance to these identity constructions outside the discourse of commercial advertising, the uses of multilingualism in nonprofit and personal advertising are also explored. All these discourses valorize German–English bilingualism and set it up as the strongest linguistic currency for the German business elite.

More than 13,000 scientists from the former Soviet Union have arrived in Israel since 1988. The purpose of this study is to analyze certain factors that influence immigrant scientists' integration into the society and academic community of Israel, with special attention to multilingual identity. Previous studies in this field emphasize the significance of Hebrew and juxtaposed Russian with Hebrew; however, in Israel, especially in the educated classes, English is an important status symbol and boundary marker. The data demonstrate that English is crucial in shaping the patterns of immigrants\' social integration. Results of statistical tests demonstrate significant differences between those who studied English and those who studied either German or French regarding feelings of personal self-actualization and job satisfaction. Moreover, command of English proved to be the determining factor for risk of losing a job. The implication is that Israeli language policy, which has traditionally taken the acquisition of Hebrew by immigrants as its major goal, should be reformulated to include access to English instruction, since without it they are unlikely to become equal members of the Israeli middle class.

The study of lyric epiphany, essential to any coordination of sociolinguistics and literature, is defined in terms of five considerations (e.g., its role in political rhetoric), and linguistic criteria such as phonic compression. One track in the argument deals with lyric epiphany in ordinary language (e.g., M.L. King's speeches), in prose (e.g., Cather and Tolstoy), and in the long poem. The second, intermittently intersecting track consists of intense analyses of four cases of linguistic epiphany in The Odyssey that involve (1) semantically ramifying root symbols such as the olive in Greece, (2) simile concentration, as in the reverse similes that commute antithetical subcategories, (3) phonic texturing (e.g., alliteration, phonaesthesia), and as a limiting case, (4) epiphany through chiasmus. The conclusions suggest the universal, cross-language and cross-cultural reality of lyric epiphany (e.g., not just classic Russian and Homeric Greek, but Quechua, Eskimo, and Sanskrit and Hebrew religious texts). Lyric epiphany is a subtype of generic epiphany: an intuition or revelation of truth values beyond language and empirical experience. Lyric epiphany, while a component of classical poetics – both Western and Eastern – and a subcategory of ideologies of Primitivism and, within that, of Modernism, is also, like the human body, part of the human experience that can and should be studied as part of cultural linguistics and sociolinguistics.

This article argues that certain aspects of language use may be more resistant to change than is language code. In communities undergoing language shift, researchers have noted ways in which indigenous patterns of interaction may be retained after the language used has shifted to English. It is argued that aspects of a speech community's interaction that are most tacit are also the most resistant to change, and are maintained through mundane routines and forms of everyday interaction. Such contexts for language use typically are the focus in studies of language socialization, which bring the theoretical perspectives of both practice theory and Bakhtinian dialogicality to bear on the question of how interactional and linguistic routines are maintained and transmitted across generations. Analysis here focuses on one particular interactional routine: the giving of directives involving a triadic participation structure, between caregivers and children in a Navajo community.

In South Africa, the transition from an apartheid regime to a popularly elected government in 1994 made possible wide-ranging changes in power relations in every sphere of human interaction, including language. Under the new political dispensation, there are 11 official languages (listed in order of numbers of speakers): Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Tswana, North Sotho, English, South Sotho, Tsonga, Swati, Ndebele, and Venda. They replace English and Afrikaans, formerly the 2 official languages.

Debating diversity, a pragmatic analysis of official liberal discourse concerning migration in Flemish Belgium, is a thorough, topical, and relevant treatment of the widespread yet near-invisible forms of racism that pervade public discourse on cultural difference. Electing not to focus on the far more widely recognized phenomenon of right-wing racism, the authors instead offer a careful critique that makes clear that the left is by no means immune to racism in its policies and practices. Following in the wake of research by a number of other politically oriented discourse analysts, this volume addresses how racism manifests itself in discourse. It therefore serves as an important reminder that ideologies are constructed, and hence contingent and changeable. Because of the broad scope of its inquiry and the relatively accessible methods it employs, it will be of interest to scholars in many fields, including anthropology, communication, political science, race and ethnic studies, and sociology, as well as linguistics. Despite its sometimes overwhelming wealth of detail, it may also appeal to a nonacademic readership, as did the Dutch version of the book when it was first published in Belgium.

Deborah Cameron's Good to talk is excellent: an innovative and insightful analysis of what she terms “communication culture” in Britain. With a few changes, it also works for the United States. Cameron analyzes how it happened and what it means that “a commonplace social activity has been transformed into a technical skill, with its own professional experts and its own technical jargon” (p. 2) – i.e., that talk has become technicized as communication. She asks two sets of questions. First, what are the ways in which people are encouraged or required to talk, what are these norms of talk, and who has established them? Second, why codify and regulate talk in these ways, and why has communication come to be seen as causal? By addressing these questions, she gives new direction to the literature on ideologies of English, beyond the examination of linguistic form and correctness issues.

This is the inaugural volume of a new series, Studies in Language and Gender. This substantial book is an edited collection of recent research in the field of language and gender, predominantly but not exclusively focused on language use in the United States. The research represented in its 20 chapters is wide-ranging, both in terms of the genres and media explored in them and in terms of analytic approaches. The genres, media, and locations investigated include, among others, American shopping channel talk (Mary Bucholtz), self-revelatory on-line journals (Laurel Sutton), office interaction (Deborah Tannen), Latina hopscotch in Los Angeles (Marjorie Goodwin), Irish-language community radio (Colleen Cotter), British teenage girls' conversations (Jennifer Coates), and a Tunisian sociolinguistic interview (Keith Walters).

This is a collection of studies of identity in the framework of Conversation Analysis. Many of the essays make explicit use of Harvey Sacks's descriptions of the “membership categorization devices” by which people construct attributions of identity in the course of interaction, as a way of accomplishing particular, situated goals. Many mount explicit arguments against psychological accounts of personal identity and social categorization according to which people bring preexisting identities into interactions. With one or two exceptions, the contributions are well argued, clearly written, and free of the jargon that sometimes makes work in Conversation Analysis inaccessible to outsiders. Readers of Language in Society should find the collection thought-provoking.

The Multiliteracies (ML) Project is a response by eleven prominent literacy researchers, known collectively as the New London Group (NLG), to changes associated with the end of the Cold War and the information economy.1 ML was conceived in 1994 at a meeting in New London, New Hampshire, US, and saw light with the publication of NLG 1996 in the Harvard Educational Review. With the appearance of the volume under review, we can now say that it is walking and has a promising future.

In this book, MacSwan accounts for code-switching constraints between Spanish and Nahuatl, a Uto-Aztecan language of central Mexico, while testing two main hypotheses: (1) Nothing constrains code-switching apart from the requirements of the mixed grammars; and (2) code-switchers have the same grammatical competence as monolinguals for the languages they use (p. 22).

Conversation analysis has opened up a new frontier for both Conversation Analysis (CA) and second-language acquisition (SLA). It is a gutsy and timely book. As a first endeavor of its kind, it ventures to apply an increasingly popular discourse analytic methodology to a field whose research has traditionally been governed by experimental paradigms. It also strikes an impressive balance between theoretical considerations and empirical analyses. The book begins with purely theoretical discussions on the larger issues that govern the two fields, then moves on to incorporate empirical data in illustrating the possibility of connecting them. The theory-to-practice continuum is completed by applying CA to two SLA-related collections of data. In a remarkable way, the author manages to become fully engaged in micro-analytic procedures without for a moment losing sight of the larger pictures that motivated these procedures.

This very interesting and useful book proposes an interdisciplinary approach to professional talk and its constitutive role in various institutional settings. It aims at reviewing the available literature and at providing theoretical insights and methodological tools for further analyses, thereby building possible bridges between academic research and its practical relevance within institutions.

This volume contains nine chapters offering ethnomethodological contributions to media studies. As such, it can be read as a demonstration of what ethnomethodology can contribute to this field. This raises two questions: First, what is it that ethnomethodology has to offer? And second, how well does the volume succeed in this demonstration?

To understand prosody in naturally occurring language requires an exceptional constellation of skills. One must have not only expertise in the analysis of pitch patterns and the complex signals that make up our perception of stress, but also a rich and informed perspective on how talk works. Although some phonologists are highly sophisticated in their approaches to prosody, empirical research in this area is both heavily based on laboratory-produced data (when it is empirical in that sense), and highly abstract in its descriptive procedures. For their part, analysts of spoken discourse, though basing their descriptions on naturally occurring language, often lack fundamental expertise in the close analysis of sound production and perception. The authors of Language in time are exceptional in the individual and collective skill they bring to their project. In this carefully crafted volume, Peter Auer, Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, and Frank Müller offer an empirically grounded and innovative view of the interplay of prosody and action in spoken language use. The volume focuses on the functions of rhythm in spoken interaction, drawing data from English, Italian, and German, and concentrating on “conversational organization and verbal performance” (p. 33). The work provides a counterbalance to the prevailing dualism in linguistic studies, by which language is first and foremost understood as a system separated from time.

As indicated by the title, this book steers away from traditional, atheoretical, praxis-oriented frameworks for studying interpreting. Its strength lies in its call for research that describes interpreted events as a means of moving away from prescriptive approaches to the discipline. The book discusses Roy's own application of discourse theory in her analysis of a videotaped interpreted event. The languages represented in that event are American Sign Language (ASL) and English, but the conclusions and recommendations made by the author are equally relevant to both signed and spoken language researchers, interpreters, interpreter trainers, and interpreters in training. Drawing on research in interactional sociolinguistics, Conversation Analysis, and ethnography of communication, Roy provides a rich description and analysis of a 30-minute meeting between a deaf student and a professor at a U.S. university. Through her analysis, Roy challenges the belief that interpreters serve as a conduit providing direct interaction between primary interlocutors.

As the title suggests, the collection under review focuses on two related issues in current linguistic research: language change – with emphasis on diachronic syntax – and what seems to be the more elusive question of “language creation” as instantiated in Creole genesis. The central empirical domain of the latter inquiry, creolization, constitutes the link between the contributions, which are all written against a coherent, broadly generative theoretical background.

The data that underlie Anneli Sarhimaa's excellent study were gathered between 1989 and 1992, under restrictive field circumstances. Visits to Karelia required what the author terms “intricate co-operation with academic and public authorities in Russia” (p. 76), and the duration of any stay was limited to a few weeks. From her home base in Finland, she made short visits to three Central Karelian villages in the summers of 1989 and 1991, working with additional Central Karelian speakers resident in the capital city of Karelia in the winters of 1990 and 1991; in 1992, a two-week trip allowed her to work in nine Tver Karelian villages in central Russia. That these compressed visits produced 30-some hours of taped interviews and 31 sets of translation-task data (15 Central Karelian, 16 Tver Karelian) does credit to her careful advance planning; the frankness with which she points to limitations in the resulting data does equal credit to her scholarly scrupulousness.

Poplack and other contributors to this important volume are to be commended for an exceptionally well crafted book, with a succession of groundbreaking studies of African American English (AAE). Although this work will undoubtedly add fuel to the flames of historical linguistic controversy that continue to swirl around African Americans, Poplack and her colleagues go far to advance hypotheses and analyses that argue in favor of the English origins of African American Vernacular English (AAVE).

In this ambitious book, Hughes extends and broadens the projects of his two earlier books, Words in time: A social history of the English vocabulary (1988), and Swearing: A social history of foul language, oaths and profanity in English (1991). The contents range from summaries of events in the history of English to specialized lexical studies; the work's real strength, as with Hughes's two earlier books, lies in its investigations of the English vocabulary. While moving in a generally diachronic fashion from the origins of English to present-day Englishes, Hughes devotes much of the book to snapshots of the English lexis at various points and in various registers, queries as to how these configurations came about, how they affect other areas of the language, and why they matter to speakers. The motivation for the book, and its great accomplishment, is to show that the English lexis is a rich historical repository. Chronological discussions can be found elsewhere, but the treatments of moments in the English lexis provided by Hughes form a special and engaging contribution. As the book jacket states, Hughes interrogates the vocabulary “as an indicator of social change and as a symbol reflecting different social dynamics between speech communities and models of dominance, cohabitation, colonialism, and globalization.”