This book is the result of the project Sociolinguistic and Psycholinguistic Aspects of Linguistic Minority Groups in Spain, started in 1993. After the introductory chapter by the editor, the book is divided into four parts, which contain 16 articles on the sociolinguistic situation of a series of established and migrant communities in Spain, viewed from an interdisciplinary standpoint. There are numerous maps and graphics, but no index.

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.

For more than a decade, Americanists have been working in the shadow of Greenberg's Language in the Americas (1987) and the hemisphere-wide classification of American Indian languages proposed there. Greenberg's work, based for the most part on naïve comparisons of lexical data with which he was largely unfamiliar, was met with considerable skepticism by scholars familiar with the problems of American linguistic classification. But Greenberg, a senior linguist who is widely recognized as the father of modern linguistic typology, aggressively defended his methods and results, and he made allies among geneticists and archeologists who found that his tripartite classification (Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene, and “Amerind”) dovetailed with some of their own ideas. Moreover, his book was published by a leading university press. Mainly for these reasons – certainly not for its critical acceptance – Language in the Americas has become a standard reference work. It is in most academic libraries in North America, and in many it is given a place of honor on the reference shelf – together with Merritt Ruhlen's Guide to the world's languages, I: Classification (published by the same press, 1987), which, at least for the Americas, does little more than uncritically recapitulate Greenberg.

Kingsley Bolton, Chinese Englishes: A sociolinguistic history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xviii, 338. Hb US$70.00.

Almost everyone knows that many places in the non-Anglophone world have had a long and tumultuous love affair with English, yet few are aware of China's flirtation, if not infatuation, with it. But with at least 200 million students of English in mainland China alone (Yong & Campbell 1995) – more than two-thirds of the population of the United States – the romance could hardly have been hidden for long. Kingsley Bolton has been letting the secret out for the past decade. This fascinating, timely, and very readable new book is the result of his many years of perseverance. In short, English in China has had “a long and barely remembered history” (p. xiii) which stretches back to the beginnings of maritime trade of Britain with Canton and Macao.

This article analyzes the sociolinguistic construction of two gendered figures in multilingual performances, namely a category of young Mongol wives in rural societies who challenge patriarchal social order, and a group of young urban Mongol men whose dream is to be rich and indulge themselves in luxury. By drawing on the analytical framework of stance and stylization, the study analyzes how the performers’ multivalent stance-taking towards constructed personas and specific social-moral orders are communicated through their skillful stylization of multilingual resources in Inner Mongolia. It also points out that language stylization and stance-taking, taking place in reference to local cultural values and linguistic ideologies, are anchored in continually evolving ethnic, gender, and class relationships in a changing, minoritized Mongolian society in the context of Chinese modernization and capitalist marketization. (Stance-taking, language stylization, gendered discourses, Mongols, multilingualism)*

The current issue of Language in Society features four articles with a single topic in common – gender and language. For this issue, I realized that by jumping one paper already in hand over a couple of others I could achieve the felicitous result of a relatively unified issue – and now that Language in Society is at five issues a year, the “jumpees” will only have to wait two months for publication in any case. My usual practice is that articles are published in strict order of acceptance – very occasionally, an author will take so long to get the very last revision – the i-dotting and t-crossing and reference-checking – done that the article will lag in publication. Extremely long articles sometimes get delayed an issue. And once or twice I have speeded up publication of an article which languished an unfairly long time in the review process.

It would be unjust to say that languages of ethnic minorities of Siberia and the Far East of Russia have not received the attention of linguists and anthropologists, yet until now there has been no book that has gathered, classified, and compared data on the sociolinguistic situation of these minorities over the whole Soviet period. This is the topic of Vakhtin's new book. It deals almost exclusively with the exterior aspect of the history of the languages; it does not analyze structural changes in the languages themselves.