Well known for its creation and adoption of modern Hebrew as its national language, Israel is still one of the most linguistically heterogeneous societies in the world. Bernard Spolsky and Elana Shohamy delve into this complex reality and describe a coherent picture of it, drawing from an updated model of linguistic policy which they elaborate. I found no few weaknesses in the book in regard to the sociological interpretation of sociolinguistic facts, but its major interest resides in the description of Israel's linguistic diversity and evolution. It is one of the very few attempts to date to do that, and it merits attention.

The verbal style of middle-class and lower-class ten-year-old children was assessed in a descriptive communication task using three different types of stimulus items: standard visual, tactual, and items embedded in a narrative. In a partial replication of Heider's (1971) work it was found that lower-class children used a global descriptive style to communicate information about standard visual (abstract) stimuli, whereas middle-class children used an analytic style. Group differences also were observed with tactually input stimuli, although the lower-class responses shifted toward an analytic style. However, both middle-class and lower-class children used an analytic style to describe stimulus items when they were embedded in a narrative context. In addition, order effects were observed, suggesting that lower-class children use an analytic style with standard visual stimuli if they perceive this style as situationally appropriate. Social class differences in verbal style are not only a function of type of stimulus item, but are also a function of strategies applied in the communicative situation.

The present review surveys the current state of sociolinguistic studies in the USSR, though due reference is made to papers on the sociology of language published as early as the 1920s.

The following trends of Soviet sociolinguistics are distinguished and discussed: (1) general theory and methodology; (2) socially motivated changes in modern Russian during the post-Revolutionary period; (3) development and mutual impact of different languages spoken in the USSR; (4) standard language as opposed to dialects; (5) non-standard language subsystems (group and professional slang, popular, non-prestige and colloquial speech, etc.); (6) language standardization and codification; (7) a study of pronouncing, morphological, and lexical variants; (8) problerns of language policy; (9) sociolinguistic aspect of functional stylistics; (10) sociolinguistic aspect of inter-personal communication; (11) mass interviewing of speakers and methods of the interview.

The review is supplied with a bibliography index.