This study of bilingual competence, linguistic attitudes, and language choice among secondary students in Valencia explores the effects of linguistic normalization since the removal of Franco's repressive measures against the Valencian language variety. The introduction of Valencian into the educational system and other measures have substantially reversed the decline of levels of competence and expanded its domains of usage but have only marginally decreased the dominance of Castilian. A survey of attitudes toward Valencian, Catalan (Barcelona variety) and Castilian reveals two distinct groups of patterns. One ascribes status and integrative value chiefly to Castilian, the other to Valencian and Catalan. Identifying the students manifesting the variants of these patterns according to socio-demographic, ideological, and behavioral factors shows how the current political dynamic between progressive nationalist forces and anti-Catalanist, Castilian-speaking forces is reflected in ongoing attitudinal divergence.Research was supported in part by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Sankoff is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and holds the Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Genomics.

This article investigates children's procedures for constructing oppositional stances in argumentative exchanges. While most previous research on children's arguments entails a monolingual bias, the present analysis focuses on bilingual practices of code-switching in disputes emerging during play activities. Drawing on more than ten hours of video-taped play interaction in a bilingual school setting, it is shown how the language contrast arising through code-switching displays and highlights the affective intensity of oppositional stances. Sequential analyses show how code-switching works to escalate social opposition, often to the peak of an argument, resulting in subsequent backdown or full termination of the dispute. Moreover, in certain participant constellations code-switching may be used to constrain opponents' opportunities to engage in further adversative interaction. Finally, it is argued that an approach to play discourse concerned with children's methods for accomplishing accountable actions allows for a view of bilingualism as socially distributed; that is, as an emergent and interactionally managed feature of discourse.An early version of this article was presented at the 9th European Conference on Second Language Acquisition (EUROSLA 9) in Lund, Sweden, June 1999. Thanks are due to Karin Aronsson and Micke Tholander for comments and discussion on an earlier draft. Financial support from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (Grant No. 96-0639:01-02) and from the Swedish National Agency for Education (Grant No. U2001/1912/S) is gratefully acknowledged.

Language is involved in processes of group identification in that it provides a focus for explicit discourses of identity and constitutes a field of less overt practices for creating groupness. Drawing on examples from Mauritian television broadcasting, this study traces the ethnicization of Mauritian Bhojpuri as a “Hindu language” through the hierarchization and subsuming of linguistic practices under larger language labels with ethno-national significance. Purist forms of Mauritian Bhojpuri that are locally perceived as “intermediate” registers between Hindi and Bhojpuri are used to represent Hindi as a language spoken in Mauritius, and at the same time to link Mauritian Bhojpuri ideologically to Hindu identity. This blurring of language boundaries serves a Hindu nationalist agenda in a diasporic location by establishing new links between linguistic forms and ethno-national values.Fieldwork in Mauritius was carried out in 1996 and 1997–1998 and was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the University of Chicago Council for Advanced Studies in Peace and International Cooperation (CASPIC). I would like to extend my sincere thanks to these institutions. Research in Mauritius was also facilitated by the University of Mauritius, where I would especially like to thank Vinesh Hookoomsing. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Second University of Chicago/University of Michigan (“Michicagoan”) Graduate Student Conference in Linguistic Anthropology and at the Working Group for Urban Sociolinguistics at New York University. My thanks go to the organizers and participants of these events, from whose comments I greatly benefited. I am also indebted to Lou Brown, Sara Friedman, Susan Gal, Vinesh Hookoomsing, Judith Irvine, Michael Silverstein, and two anonymous reviewers for Language in Society for their careful readings and helpful suggestions at different stages in the writing of this article. Of course, any mistakes are my own. Most of all, I am indebted to the many Mauritians without whose help and friendship my research would have been impossible.

This article analyzes seven Japanese all-male friendly conversations, focusing on stereotypically gendered sentence-final particles to ascertain whether and how Japanese men native to the Kansai (western) region of Japan, aged 19–68 years, use these features to create a gendered identity. Quantitative methods are employed to establish the frequency with which such stereotypically gendered forms are used. A close discourse analysis investigates how the men use these forms in particular contexts to index particular identities, which may or may not correspond to traditional notions of Japanese masculinity.Earlier versions of this article were presented to the Department of Anthropology at the University of Iowa and to the Stanford Sociolinguistics Research Group at Stanford University. I thank the members of those audiences for their vital feedback. I am indebted to Janet S. (Shibamoto) Smith, Michael Silverstein, Miyako Inoue, Shigeko Okamoto, Laura Graham, Scott Fabius Kiesling, Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, Hari Kanta Ogren, Jane Hill, and an anonymous reviewer for carefully reading and commenting on drafts. Without the support of the Kobe College Corporation and the National Science Foundation (Grant # BCS9817943) this article and its larger project would not have been possible.

Literacy practices as social acts and Literacy and motivation share an interest in the question of what engages children in reading. Both are relevant to our political times, when the federal government micromanages literacy education in schools. The U.S. federal initiative “No Child Left Behind” gave rise to the Reading First grants, and both are designed to “get kids reading at grade level.” Reading First ended up not including “motivation” as a rationale for funding. The government's preoccupation with phonics instruction has superseded the more important issue of what makes a child want (or not want) to read in the first place. Literacy and motivation is a useful corrective. However, Cynthia Lewis's Literacy practices as social acts really gets at the heart of the matter.

Multimodal Discourse offers a theoretical framework for the study of communication in the modern world of multimedia. The book helps students of linguistics, cultural studies, and communication as well as journalists, photographers, designers, and others who work practically in the field of communication and design, to understand and differentiate the distinct levels of mass communication and their interaction. The authors also give an overview of the development of communication and discourse and show how this development is influenced by overall changes in society and social life. All the definitions of theoretical concepts and notions are further explained and illustrated by a great variety of examples. Linguists have shown that discourse is not only used and expressed in and/or by language; Kress & van Leeuwen also apply the term to music, architecture, and many other domains of culture. The notion of modes, however, is explained only in a very abstract way as “semiotic resources which allow the simultaneous realization of discourses and types of (inter)action” (p. 21). Media, on the other hand, are described as the material resources being used for the production. Examples of modes mentioned by the authors are music, language, and images. The medium is supposed to be the material, such as a book (6).

This volume of 12 individual essays is an important step forward in the literature on child language development. As the title hints, the book follows Talking to children (Snow & Ferguson 1977). Both volumes focus on input and language acquisition. Talking to children demonstrated the importance of phenomenon of baby talk and dealt with the nature of speech addressed to young children and different parental conversational styles. The title Talking to adults gives an impression that this time, more attention will be paid to speech used by children to adults, but that is not what it seems to be. Rather, the contributors here focus on how children participate in discourse with participating structures more complex than dyads – that is, when the audience is “larger” than just the child's own mother, and when simplified registers are not necessarily used. The pioneering Talking to children, in contrast, was concerned mainly with dyadic interaction with a primary caretaker. The papers in Talking to adults aim to show that child's participation in such multiparty talk seems to contribute greatly to the pragmatic development of children. The 12 chapters give an overview of empirical research concerning the acquisition of various discursive skills: explanations and narratives, control talk, affect, humor, telling a joke, telling lies, and bilingualism.

The 2000 Georgetown University Round Table focused on “the application of linguistics to … a full range of … professions” (p. 3). It offered tracks on education, journalism, law, medicine, technology, and other professions. The book reviewed here presents highlights from that conference: six plenary speeches, eight selected conference papers, and a closing discussion among plenary speakers, conference organizers, and audience members. The chapters are distributed fairly evenly across the range of professions identified for the conference. The plenary speakers were Shirley Brice Heath, John R. Rickford, Allan Bell, Roger W. Shuy, Richard M. Frankel, and Lee Lubbers. James E. Alatis and Heidi Hamilton were the conference chairs. In this review, I will not comment on each chapter of the book; rather, I will highlight some themes and focus on articles I found particularly relevant to them.

When I have a dinner party, it's a matter of great importance to me that all the places are set with the same tableware. It's the same at a restaurant – a group of people sitting down for dinner should be served on the same dishes. It's neurotic, I know. But aside from some primitive sense of symmetrical comfort, the plates tell you much about the meal that is to follow: Fine porcelain sets expectations of grace and elegance; brightly colored stoneware establishes a casual ambience; and simple plates communicate a utilitarian attitude to the ensuing meal. The form serves as a gatekeeper, announcing at the outset the intended clientele. If a family with small children in search of cheeseburgers and fries wanders by chance into an establishment that places Royal Doulton in front them, they will know instantly that the content will not meet their expectations. Form matters, and content is partly conveyed by the form.

This book uses a feminist, poststructuralist perspective to examine the relationships among gender, second language acquisition and multilingualism. It is a welcome addition to the study of these topics, which are usually examined separately. Gender is rarely considered in research on second language acquisition, and most studies of language and gender are conducted in monolingual contexts. This volume proposes a new interdisciplinary approach to these issues which “strives to theorize and to investigate the role of language in the production of gender relations, and role of gender dynamics in language learning and use” (p. 22).

It is an astonishing fact that the dynamo producing some of the most powerful scholarship on the history of the English language is not even in Indo-European territory. Under the inspired leadership of Professor Matti Rissanen, Helsinki has reached an unprecedented level of effort in this field, and, when Rissanen retired in 2001, Terttu Nevalainen became his successor as director of the Research Unit for Variation and Change in English. This volume celebrates her elevation to her new role and, at the same time, her fiftieth birthday.

By the end of the twentieth century, Wales had become a hotbed of language planning. The sharp decline experienced by the Welsh language in the first half of the century had given way to a state of “level maintenance.” The Welsh Language Act of 1993 has brought about marked improvements in the language's profile and in people's attitudes toward bilingualism. Language planning in Wales has created significant interest in other parts of Europe and around the world in other minority language communities hoping to achieve something of the Welsh successes of recent years. Nevertheless, if there have been important accomplishments, much still remains to be done to turn Wales into a truly bilingual society. The edited collection Language revitalization is an excellent, state-of-the-art volume by top specialists who analyze in detail what has been accomplished and identify remaining challenges.

This book should be of particular interest to sociolinguists who believe in the value of discourse analysis for a better understanding of society. As indicated in the title, Varro's overall objective is to contribute to a nascent sociologie de la mixité by examining the concept of “mixed” as used at various levels of life in society. Her insightful analysis results in an enlightening description of some fundamental aspects of contemporary French society regarding the condition of immigrants and foreigners in the nation. She accomplishes this task through a constructionist approach to language inspired by J. L. Austin and Pierre Bourdieu, among others. The focus is on behavioral consequences of the categorizations and discourse engendered by a deceptively simple term, mixte, as applied to individuals or other social units. For instance, so-called mixed families are often automatically considered as dysfunctional and may become scapegoats at the societal level.

This collection of eleven articles addresses in diverse ways the role of language in the construction of social, regional, national, and supranational identities. The contributions are not based on a common theoretical concept and common methodology. The approaches to the subject vary greatly, ranging from a subtle empirical sociolinguistic study embedded in the theoretical framework of variational linguistics and the theory of language maintenance and language loss, to articles exploring aspects of language policies and political science, to an anthropological contribution.

It is frequently remarked that, for instance, the French language is the French nation, or the Arabic language is the Arab nation. Whatever the nature of the link between language and nation is, language is perceived as an important component in defining social groups.

Many casual observers outside Asia believe that everyone in Hong Kong, owing to its British colonial past, speaks English as fluently as the queen (or, at least, George Bush). Others, hearing the grunts of martial artists like Jackie Chan, might think that English is truly a foreign entity to the people of Hong Kong, as unknown to them as, say, pizza or hamburgers. Both assumptions, as Kingsley Bolton shows in this fascinating new collection of essays, are quite wrong. Instead, the place of English in Hong Kong is probably unique in the world: It is neither simply a variety poorly mimicking the language of the UK, nor an imperial tongue imposed on a subservient populace. It is these dynamics of culture, identity, economics, globalization, education – and, indeed, politics – that are addressed in this stimulating book.

For those who find it useful to conceive of a language as a meaning-conveying instrument embedded in a cultural system, this brief, well-written treatment of pronominal address in Spanish will hold few surprises, but it will provide welcome and well-reasoned documentation of the major positions, supplemented by equally welcome expansions and elaborations of familiar points. Speakers of Spanish tend to address some interlocutors on some occasions using second-person verb forms, while addressing others, or the same on different occasions, using third-person forms, variably reinforcing the verbal morphology with the pronoun tú in the first cases and usted in the second. The author investigates alternative forms of what she calls “pronominal address” (irrespective of whether the pronoun is actually used), with data obtained from observations of workers at a construction company in Veracruz, Mexico, and from their own explanations of why they use one address form or the other. A good sample of the data is provided, presented in standard Spanish orthography with good, readable translations into English. For theoretical underpinning, the author offers the ethnography of speaking (Hymes 1962) and speech codes (Philipsen 1997).

Benjamin Bailey's Language, race and negotiation of identity is the first extensive sociolinguistic study of a Dominican-American communicative community, and is thus a timely and welcome addition to the literature on Spanish/English bilingual situations in the United States. Bailey conducted field work among second-generation working-class Dominican-American high school students in Providence, Rhode Island, from August 1996 to July 1997. (The school at the time of field work was 60% Hispanic, 20% Dominican, and the rest largely Puerto Rican and Guatemalan.) His investigation focuses on the ways in which linguistic deployments by these young people enact ethnic and racial identity. His data are drawn from videotaped activities of six high school students in school and in one nonschool setting, interviews about language use and ethnic/racial issues with high school and college students, and general participant observation in school, home, and community contexts (p. 36).

Publications received.

I write with deep regret to inform the sociolinguistics community of the death of Dr. Cheryl Wharry on July 7, 2003, at her home. Dr. Wharry taught linguistics and TESOL at Columbus State University, Columbus, GA. She took her Ph.D. from Oklahoma State University, where her dissertation was “‘I'm gonna preach it, amen’: The role of ‘amen’ and similar formulaic expressions in African American sermonic discourse.” Her recent publication in Language in Society 32(2), “Amen and Hallelujah preaching: Discourse functions in African American sermons,” and her book review, which coincidentally appeared in the same issue, show us something of what we have lost.