In 1971, women students at the Harvard Divinity School began protesting the use in their classes of BOMFOG (“brotherhood of man, fatherhood of god”) talk, the equation of the universal with the masculine exemplified by apparently generic uses of forms like he and man. Responding to reports of these protests in the Harvard Crimson, Harvard's linguistics faculty wrote a letter to the editor explaining that English masculine forms were linguistically “unmarked” for gender and patronizingly assuring the protestors that “there is no need for anxiety or pronoun envy” (quoted in Livia, p. 3). Once launched, that phrase begged to be a title, and Anna Livia's enlightening book is a most suitable bearer. This is a volume from which linguists and others interested in the linguistic encoding of gender can learn much.

Ana Roca & M. Cecilia Colombi (eds.), Mi lengua: Spanish as a heritage language in the United States. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. 2003. 320 pp. $29.95.

The teaching of Spanish to native speakers has been packaged under diverse names, emerging most recently as “Spanish as a Heritage Language.” Whether it is couched as developmental bilingual education, maintenance bilingual education, Spanish for native speakers, or heritage language development, advocates for programs of academic excellence in two languages have been dealt a stunning blow by recent federal school reform measures. The No Child Left Behind Act, passed in 2001, eliminates, for all intents and purposes, the Bilingual Education Act (Title VII), as programs for English language learners have been subsumed under Title III of NCLB. All reference to bilingual education has been expunged from federal parlance, replaced in both form and substance by English language acquisition programs. The former Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Language Affairs (OBEMLA), the repository of research on minoritized languages in the United States, has been transformed into the Office of English Language Acquisition, Language Enhancement, and Academic Achievement for Limited-English-Proficient Students. Needless to say, support for native-language instruction is not found in Title III, as English language acquisition takes center stage. Add to this scenario the referenda passed in California, Arizona, and Massachusetts dismantling bilingual education, as well as the anti-immigrant sentiment sweeping the country, and the prospect of fostering Spanish as a heritage language seems dismal indeed.

This volume contains the contributions presented at the first plenary conference on Integrational Linguistics held in London in 2000, an event at which I participated. The basic tenets of Integrational Linguistics were developed by Roy Harris at Oxford in the 1980s and 1990s; while many aspects of this approach remain a matter of debate, its assumptions and practices have become sufficiently firm to be the subject of a couple of introductory texts (Harris 1998, Toolan 1996). Harris's agenda has been “to challenge the monumental complacency of mainstream linguistics” (p. 3) by pointing out that the discipline is no more than an elaborate edifice built on a myth.

Boyd Davis, Alzheimer talk, text and context: Enhancing communication. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

I picked up Boyd Davis's edited volume with some anxiety. I had let go of my Alzheimer's research for a number of painful reasons in graduate school and had, over the past 10 years, invented myself in the sociopolitics of language learning and teaching. When I spotted the volume at a book exhibit, I thought: Would I be able to connect to any of the work anymore? A lot of research ground gets covered in a decade; would I be able to pick up any of the conversational threads? When a couple of months later the editor of Language and Society contacted me about possibly reviewing it, I took it as a sign beckoning and inviting me back to that space. Needless to say, I was delighted at the array of readings. The volume covers a range from personal accounts (by Jeutonne Brewer), to issues of identity, personhood maintenance, and gender (D. Shenk; E. B. Ryan K. Byrne, H. Spykerman & J. B.Orange; C. Pope & D. N. Ripich), to discourse markers, lexical variation, and bilingualism (Davis, M. Maclagan & P. Mason, Davis & C Bernstein, G. M. J. Nold), to concerns relating to caregiver training (K. Byrne & J. B. Orange; Ryan, Spykerman & A. P. Anas; N. Green; and L. Russell-Pinson & L. Moore) and metaphors by which language and Alzheimer's research can be described (H. E. Hamilton). Each of these areas laminates Alzheimer's talk with feeling and care, thus countering the sedimented psycholinguistic tropes that have typically written about Alzheimer discourse in clinical and cold ways.

Geoffrey Sampson, The “language instinct” debate. Revised edition. London and New York: Continuum, 2005. Pp. xiii, 224. Pb $30.00.

First published in 1997 under the title Educating Eve but now revised and expanded and with a useful foreword from Paul Postal, this book presents and critiques all the main arguments that have been offered in support of the thesis that a body of language-specific knowledge is innate in the human child. Sampson finds the thesis unproven on detailed grounds of logic or evidence, and proceeds to sketch an alternative basis for first-language development, rooted in Popperian science and nurture. As the new title indicates, the book purports specifically to respond to Steven Pinker's The language instinct, but somewhat surprisingly Pinker's book isn't extensively debated here: It seems that the publishing demigod is mostly objected to for having renewed the intellectual standing of the nativist stance in the 1990s, and matters are certainly further confused by Sampson's frank admiration for Pinker's more recent The blank slate.

What is a native speaker? This question has been taken for granted in linguistics, which has frequently taken as its starting point the monolingual community in which the native speaker is one who speaks the language “from the crib” (Singh, 40) throughout his or her life. In the idealized case, even for sociolinguistics, the native speaker has one native language which s/he speaks fluently: s/he is a rather “sedentary” person who is “uncontaminated” in significant ways by speakers of other languages (Salikoko Mufwene, 114).

Anti-Black language ideologies manifest in exclusionary language policies (e.g. Sung & Allen-Handy 2019), educational tracking (e.g. Sung 2018), and scholarly claims of Black ‘deficiency’ (Smitherman 2000). A liberal educational research tradition has countered with ethnographic accounts of cultural ‘mismatch’ (Michaels 2006) vis-à-vis Black educational ‘failure’. Conducting a textual analysis of an archive of ethnography of communication texts, I locate multiple genealogical linkages holding between ‘mismatch’ and deprivation discourses, principally ones centered on representations of ‘pathological’ Black ‘matriarchy’. Paralleling Black feminist theorizations of ‘fungible Black flesh’ (e.g. Hartman 1997), I account for these representations by conceptualizing ‘fungible Black sound’. I further argue that ‘fungible fugitivity’ (e.g. Snorton 2017), that is, how Blackness fluidly responds to white incursion is linguistically realized in acts of ‘signifyin(g)’ (e.g. Mitchell-Kernan 1999), yielding the analytic category ‘fungible(ly) fugitive Black sound’. Lastly, I reread an ethnographic text with this analytic to illustrate its affordance for (re)imagining Black futurity. (Black sound, fungibility, fugitivity, raciolinguistic ideologies, ethnography of communication, Black studies)*

This collection aims to offer, in the words of its editor, “a first introduction” to the study of discourse. While its companion vol. 1, Discourse as structure and process, is mainly concerned with cognitive issues, the contributors to vol. 2 focus on social organization and social processes.

In his Introduction to Volume I of Sacks's Lectures on conversation (1992), Emmanuel Schegloff observes (1992:lviii) that his own effort at overview was “truly daunting,” mostly because of “the extraordinary richness and multi-facetedness of Sacks's corpus … In its variety, depth, and freshness of vision it defies domestication into convenient guidelines to a reader.” Such a statement – indeed, any reading of the two-volume set of Lectures – should give pause to someone attempting a textbook rendering of Sacks and his work. But such a text is precisely what Silverman has produced, and the effort is remarkably successful on its own terms.