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 The government's preoccupation with phonics instruction has superseded the more important issue of what makes a child want (or not want) to read in the first place.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.

Building on recent work supporting a sociolinguistic approach to orthographic choice, this study engages with paratextual language use in yuri, a subgenre of Japanese shōjo manga ‘girls’ comics’ that centers on same-sex romantic and/or erotic relationships between female characters. The comic magazine Comic Yuri Hime has been the dominant, if not only, yuri-oriented published magazine in Japan since its inception in 2005. Though both written and consumed by a primarily female audience, the magazine has undergone numerous attempts to rebrand and refocus the target audience as a means to broaden the magazine's readership. This change in target demographic is reflected in the stylistic representation of paratextual occurrences of the second-person pronoun anata, indicating the role of the textual landscape in reflecting, and reifying, an imagined target audience. (Script variation, manga, popular media, Japan, yuri manga)

This article analyzes the use of metapragmatic description in the ethnoclassification of language by native speakers on the Franco-Antillean island of Saint Barthélemy. A prevalent technique for metapragmatic description is facilitated by the differential formation of honorific registers in the island's indigenous languages, so that speakers essentialize honorific pronouns as tropes of whole languages and classify the languages in such terms. This process reflects the varied geolinguistic and generational attributes of these speakers, whose register or social-dialectal calculations are all based ultimately on folk ideologies of honorification. (Classification, language ideology, French Creole, metapragmatics, Caribbean sociolinguistics)

This article links the use of you know in a group of mostly working-class London adolescents (WCG) and I know in a mostly middle-class group (MCG) to Foucault's notion of power/knowledge and, by extension, to group-specific (re)production of dominant discourses and power relations. Speakers in WCG use you know clause-finally to mark the information in that clause, which tends to be about the deviance of others, as dominant. Speakers in MCG use I know either clause-initially or as a stand-alone item in reaction to the previous speaker's utterance and to mark that utterance as dominant. Thus, the use of you know shows relatively active identity construction while the use of I know shows relatively reactive identity construction, but both groups construct their identities indirectly: WCG because they talk about others, and MCG because they react to others. Relations between these processes and class and gender identities are discussed.

Optimality Theory (OT) has been a major force driving developments in formal linguistics during the past decade. Like parameter-setting accounts, OT seeks to describe the range within which languages can vary; but instead of fixing parameters, OT proposes that languages, and children learning languages, arrange a set of constraints in a hierarchical order of strength that determines specific linguistic characteristics. The constraints proposed by OT are constraints on the well-formedness of the output of a grammar, and they are of two types: (i) markedness constraints, which exert pressure toward unmarked types of structure such as CV syllables or voiceless final obstruents; and (ii) faithfulness constraints, which maintain lexical contrasts such as CV and CVC syllable types, or voicing distinctions in final obstruents. The two types of constraints are in conflict, so that no particular constraint can be satisfied without violating others. In OT, “satisfaction” and “violation” are not absolute but a matter of degree, because all constraints play a role in the grammar of each language, though in a different order of strength or priority within a dominance hierarchy.

To understand this book, a little background information helps. I first encountered Ali Mazrui in 1968–70 when I was the first lecturer in linguistics at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda; Mazrui, a member of the political science faculty, was already a famous orator, acknowledged by all as possessing “a golden tongue.” Since then, he has gone on to become probably the most famous African studies professor in the United States; he was the presenter of the nine-part BBC/PBS television series The Africans: A triple heritage, and he is the author of many books and articles on Africa. He has taught at many universities around the world, and is now director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies and Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at the State University of New York at Binghamton. His junior co-author (a relative?), Alamin M. Mazrui, was trained as a linguist and is an associate professor of Black studies at Ohio State University. Both are native speakers of Swahili from Mombasa, Kenya (they prefer to refer to the language as Kiswahili, with its noun class prefix, as it would be if one were speaking the language itself). Kiswahili, of course, is probably the best-known African language; many people in East Africa and other areas (e.g. the Democratic Republic of Congo) speak it as a second language. Furthermore, it is one of the few indigenous languages with official status in an African nation; it is the official language of Tanzania, and the co-official language in Kenya along with English. However, Kiswahili is spoken natively mainly along the East African coastline and on the offshore islands (e.g. Zanzibar), often by persons with a dual Arabic-African heritage similar to that of the Mazruis.

This issue of Language in Society has been designed to explore the relevance of the concept of Community of Practice (CofP) – as presented by Lave & Wenger 1991 and by Wenger 1998 – to research in sociolinguistics, with a particular focus on its value in language and gender research. The contents of the issue grew out of a symposium at the Sixth International Conference on Language and Social Psychology, held at the University of Ottawa in May 1997. I invited the contributors whose work is represented in this issue to join me in exploring the usefulness of the CofP framework in relation to their own research.

Hong Kong has received much world attention in recent years. After a century and half of colonial occupation, it was returned to China in 1997. Before British rule, it was an unremarkable seaside outpost of Guangzhou (Canton), the premier city in South China. Thus, the speech of its overwhelming majority is called “Cantonese” in English. In fact, Hong Kong and Guangzhou share essentially the same speech, the primary differences being lexical choices.

Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen & Cecilia E. Ford (eds.) Sound patterns in interaction: Cross-linguistic studies from conversation. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004. Pp. 404. Hb $156.00.

A successor to Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 1996, this volume contains a similar collection of papers at the interface between phonetics and conversational interaction. There is a lengthy introductory essay by the editors, followed by 12 chapters grouped into three broad sections: “Turn-taking,” “Projecting and expanding turns,” and “Connecting across turns.” Each chapter has a separate bibliography, and the volume has a general index. Seven of the contributions describe British or American English, while a further five address the features of German, Finnish, and Japanese. All the contributions represent work carried out strictly within the theoretical framework of Conversation Analysis (CA), an approach that lends itself well to the study of turn-taking.