This is a collection of studies of identity in the framework of Conversation Analysis. Many of the essays make explicit use of Harvey Sacks's descriptions of the “membership categorization devices” by which people construct attributions of identity in the course of interaction, as a way of accomplishing particular, situated goals. Many mount explicit arguments against psychological accounts of personal identity and social categorization according to which people bring preexisting identities into interactions. With one or two exceptions, the contributions are well argued, clearly written, and free of the jargon that sometimes makes work in Conversation Analysis inaccessible to outsiders. Readers of Language in Society should find the collection thought-provoking.

Kay McCormick, Language in Cape Town's District Six. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. xv + 253 pp.

Kay McCormick's book is a multifaceted analysis of language norms and language practices in the bilingual District Six of Cape Town (South Africa). District Six is probably the best-known inner city neighborhood of Cape Town: In the 1980s the eyes of the world witnessed the forced removal of many of its inhabitants and the brutal demolition of homes in yet another attempt by the apartheid government to get rid of a cosmopolitan and ethnically mixed area. The area is relatively well defined, and its language contact situation makes it an excellent site for the study of language alternation and code-switching.

Many linguists believe that the revitalization of moribund languages, where there may only be a handful of elderly fluent speakers left, is a noble (if not also nearly impossible) ideal for those native communities involved in such work; and this is not to mention the reintroduction of a long-dead language, such as the South Australian language Kaurna (pronounced [ga:na]), spoken on the Adelaide Plains until the last native speaker, Ivaritji (a.k.a. Amelia Taylor), died in 1929. Rob Amery challenges the standards by which language revitalization programs are judged as successful, while giving us a step-by-step method for the reintroduction and revalorization of an extinct native tongue, which he calls the Formulaic Method. This detailed case study of the beginning stages of Kaurna language revival will be of interest not just to linguists involved in the field, but especially to community members and other nonspecialists who are somehow connected with lesser-used languages and language revival efforts. Amery's work is also an important contribution to the emerging field of ecological linguistics and its application to language planning issues.

This study continues an investigation of lexical acculturation in Native American languages using a sample of 292 language cases distributed from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego (Brown 1994). Focus is on the areal diffusion of native language words for imported European Objects and concepts. Approximately 80% of all sharing of such terms is found to occur among closely genetically related languages. Amerindian languages only distantly related, or not related at all, tend to share native labels for acculturated items only when these have diffused to them from a lingua franca, such as Chinook Jargon (a pidgin trade language of the Pacific Northwest Coast) or Peruvian Quechua (the language of the Inca empire). Lingua francas also facilitate diffusion of terms through genetically related languages; but sometimes, as in the case of Algonquian languages, these are neither familiar American pidgins nor languages associated with influential nation states. An explanatory framework is constructed around the proposal that degree of bilingualism positively influences extent of lexical borrowing. (Amerindian languages, bilingualism, language contact, lexical acculturation, lexical diffusion, lingua francas)

Carol Myers-Scotton, Contact linguistics: Bilingual encounters and grammatical outcomes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. xiv, 342. Pb.

The scope of Myers-Scotton's new book is far wider than that of her earlier study (1993), which focused exclusively on code-switching. She has now applied her Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model to a much broader range of language contact phenomena, covering areas such as convergence (what others have termed “interference”), language attrition and shift, and creoles and mixed languages. There is no doubt that the model does offer many insights into the dynamics of various types of language contact, and while Myers-Scotton's remarks remain fairly tentative with regard to some of these fields, this book certainly opens up new avenues for exploration in each of them. However, the most substantial and possibly the most controversial part of the book is again that which presents the latest developments in her account of bilingual code-switching, which has already achieved worldwide renown, so for want of space we will focus only on this part of the book.

Ruth Mace, Clare J. Holden and Stephen Shennan (eds.), The evolution of cultural diversity: A phylogenetic approach. London: UCL Press, 2005 Pp. x, 291. Pb $34.95.

This book is in two parts, the first of which presents papers on unified anthropological themes and the second, coevolutionary approaches to some anthropological questions, involving the integration of findings from more than one anthropological field.

Neal Hutcheson (producer and director). Mountain talk. Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Language and Life Project, 2003. DVD $20.

Twenty years ago, I met many of my grandmother's fifty-odd cousins for the first time. Born in Panther Hollow, North Carolina (pronounced “Painter Holler”), my grandmother moved to the nearest town, Asheville, when she was a child. On the occasion of her seventieth birthday, many of the cousins she left behind came down out of the mountains to celebrate with her. A few of them spoke in a unique dialect, a “brogue” riddled with odd turns of phrase and vocabulary.

This book, an extensively revised version of a 1992 dissertation from the University of Amsterdam, presents a wealth of information about the culture, documented history, and languages of the Canadian Métis – an ethnic group descended from French and other European fur traders and hunters and their Native American wives. The Métis live in several areas in the Canadian West, as well as parts of North Dakota, Montana, and further afield. This group has been a recognized and clearly constituted ethnic entity in the region since at least the mid-19th century. The focus throughout Bakker's book is on the nature and origin of Michif, the unique language that has brought the Métis (especially those who traditionally hunted buffalo and who came from the Red River of Saskatchewan) to the attention of students of intimate language contact. Michif has possibly been in existence as a language since the 1840s (p. 160), although actual attestations of linguistic material date only from the early 1970s.