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.

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.

Adam Kendon, Gesture: Visible action as utterance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. 410. Hb $90.00.

Written by one of the foremost authorities on the subject, this book gives a definitive account of gesture and its study. It is an excellent and thought-provoking work for all readers interested in everyday interactions across various disciplines. The book can be divided into two parts: The first six chapters present a detailed history of gesture studies dating back to Roman antiquity and continuing to the twentieth century, especially in the Western tradition. The latter half of the book provides micro-analyses of gesture practices occurring in everyday interactions in various settings.

Walt Wolfram & Natalie Schilling-Estes, American English: Dialects and variation. (Language in Society, 25). 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. Pp. xv, 452. Pb $36.95.

American English, an introductory textbook about dialect variation, is a revised version of the textbook that first appeared in 1998 and represents another addition to the array of educational materials about American dialects that the first author has been producing for over three decades. It is a versatile textbook with an intended audience of any student who takes a “course on dialects” (p. x). Its lack of linguistic formalism and statistics makes it accessible to students with no linguistics background, and its continued emphasis on the relevance of dialect awareness to American society will help non-linguists apply the material effectively. Owing to its wide scope, it cannot delve too deeply into any of the theoretical issues; however, its succinct overviews of the debates, annotated bibliographies at the end of each chapter, and copious examples from a range of dialects make it a useful reference for experienced linguists.

Elise Kärkkäinen, Epistemic stance in English conversation: A description of its interactional functions, with a focus on I think. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 115). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. ix, 207. Hb $102.00.

In this innovative study of epistemic stance marking in English conversation, Elise Kärkkäinen attempts to cross-fertilize discourse-functional linguistics with conversation analysis, and her effort bears fruit. She moves deftly between quantitative and qualitative methods, juxtaposing frequency tables with conversational transcripts, and comes out with a bold thesis in hand: “Showing commitment to the status of the information that one is providing, i.e. marking epistemic stance … [is] an essentially interactive activity” (p. 183).

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.

Key terms in language and culture (hereafter Key terms) is an ambitious collection of 75 short essays on concepts central to linguistic anthropology and related fields. This book began as an informational session at the American Anthropological Association meetings in 1998 and was first published as a special issue of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (vol. 9, no. 1–2, 1999). Alessandro Duranti, Key terms' chief editor and architect, is an experienced navigator in the varied terrain of language and culture research; he is also the author of Linguistic anthropology, a comprehensive textbook that covers the discipline's major theoretical and methodological contributions. In Key terms, Duranti appeals to the expertise of 74 other scholars working on questions central to language and culture research. The result is a powerful and eclectic volume that brings together core concepts from anthropology, linguistics, folklore, philosophy, sociology, and psychology, among other fields.

Deborah Cameron & Don Kulick, Language and sexuality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi, 176. Pb $21.00.

Paul McIlvenny (ed.), Talking gender and sexuality. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. x, 332. Hb $106.00.

Two recent books, Language and sexuality, by Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick, and Talking gender and sexuality (TGS), edited by Paul McIlvenny, seek to elucidate the social construction of gender and sexuality by combining the methods of interactive discourse analysis with the theoretical insights of poststructuralism, feminism, and queer theory. Guided by the basic ethnomethodological question “How are gender and sexuality ‘done’?”, the authors of both volumes are motivated, at least implicitly, by a political commitment to deconstructing and opposing sexism and heteronormativity (the ideologically enforced assumption that all people are or should be straight). In one way or another, therefore, both books also ask, paraphrasing McIlvenny, “By what linguistic-interactional means might normative gender and sexual identities be ‘undone’?” Although McIlvenny's coauthors all share his theoretical concerns at a general level, the chapters in TGS focus primarily on the means whereby gender and sexual categories are positively instantiated and indexed in talk; only a few explicitly engage how these modes of categorization might be resisted or transformed. Cameron & Kulick take their theorizing one step further, questioning the analytical and political utility of the concept of sexual identity itself.

This book is an outcome of a colloquium, held in 1997, on ideology and language policies with special focus on English. There are nine chapters, with a lucid introduction by Ricento and a bibliography at the end. Ricento also contributes a chapter on the theoretical aspects of language planning and policy. The other chapters touch on language policies in Australia (Helen Moore); colonial language policies (Chaps. 3 and 7, by Alastair Pennycook); language ideologies in the US (Terrence G.Wiley); linguistic imperialism with reference to English (Robert Phillipson); and policies and the role of English in Sri Lanka (Suresh Canagurajah), North India (Selma K. Sonntag), and South Africa (Stanly G. M. Ridge).

The two books under review, Motivation in language planning and language policy (MLPP) and Multilingualism and government (M&G), are both about language policy, at least at one level, and both are, or claim to be, based on case studies. That is the end of any similarity between them.

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.

A major theme of this collection (which first appeared as an issue of Pragmatics, vol. 5, no. 2, 1995; the new publication includes revisions) is the concept of the public sphere, as this stems from early work by Habermas (1989 [1962]). However, the Habermasian notion of the public sphere as a category of bourgeois culture (denoting the site for the emergence of free rational discourse among individuals uncoerced by state-institutional structures) constitutes only one rubric of the thematic unity of the work under review. Contributors to the volume, in addition to being critical of Habermas's opus, continue an earlier concern in linguistic anthropology with a constructionist perspective on languages and publics, on the one hand, and the significance of reflexivity in the very practice of the field, on the other. In these two interrelated respects, the volume is an important contribution to our understanding of how concepts of languages are invented, constructed, and negotiated in historical, power-loaded contexts that also provide for a parallel construction of multiple public spheres.These spheres are partial and skewed, and, most of the time, they operate in such a way that mystifying ideological discourses take over the task of legitimating and institutionalizing inclusions and exclusions, while pretending to speak for all, or to present linguistic entities as natural products having little, if anything, to do with human agency and invested interests.

This book is the second volume of the Handbook of perceptual dialectology. Expanding on the coverage of both regions and methodologies, its aim is to underline the importance of considering folk (i.e., non-linguists') conceptions and perceptions of and responses to dialect phenomena in general, and to language differences in particular. Perceptual dialectology, or even “folk dialectology,” is nowadays understood – thanks to the work pioneered by Dennis Preston over the past two decades – as a multidisciplinary macro-linguistic and micro-sociolinguistic approach within the field of folk linguistics, an enterprise that, in general, gives added prominence to both linguistic structure and details of dialect production and perception differences and attitudes, complementing the more global approach of the social psychology of language. As we know, an important aspect of the complex social psychology of speech communities is the arbitrary and subjective intellectual and emotional response of the members of a society to the languages and varieties in their social environment: Different language varieties are often associated with deep-rooted emotional responses – in short, with social attitudes, such as thoughts, feelings, stereotypes, and prejudices about people, about social, ethnic and religious groups, and about political entities. These non-linguists' emotional responses and perceptions of dialects and dialect divisions may, paradoxically, not coincide with those proposed by linguists, since cultural, social, political, economic, or historical facts or other circumstances within the speech community may lead to the belief that there is a linguistic boundary or a sociolinguistic barrier where in reality there is none, or vice versa. Crucially important, then – as Preston's work has emphasized – is the comparison of scientific and folk characterizations of sociolectal and/or geolectal varieties and areas. Such an approach builds a more complete and accurate picture of the speaker's linguistic behavior, in the context of its complex social psychology, as well as of the regard for language use and variety within the community, in our sociolinguistically based search for an understanding of the dynamics of speech communities.