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 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).

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.

An analysis of the salutations of seventy-five letters of application for an academic position at a large southwestern university showed that a majority of the writers (forty-seven as compared to twenty-eight) had become sensitive to the problems of beginning a letter to an unknown person or group with a masculine greeting. The twenty-eight applicants who used masculine greetings used only four different forms. But the forty-seven applicants who chose to use sex-neutral greetings had no well-established pattern to follow. Hence, they used nineteen different forms, which shows that the matter is currently in a state of experimentation. From an analysis of the candidates' supporting data, it was clear that the writers who used the sex-neutral greetings were the better qualified candidates. Females were more inclined than males to use sex-neutral greetings. And there was a correlation between the part of the country where a candidate lived and whether or not a sex-neutral greeting was chosen. (Sexism, diachronic linguistics, regional dialectology)

This article uses a dialogue between memory studies (MS) and ethnographic and interactional sociolinguistics (EIS) to explore the dynamics of interdisciplinarity. MS focuses on the social remembering of high-profile and often traumatic events, and this is relevant to EIS's growing interest in (in)securitization. MS is increasingly keen to explore everyday practices of remembering in interscalar analyses, and EIS’ expertise in the study of mundane communication can provide essential support. But there are major differences in their focal concerns and analytical cultures, as well as in their approaches to interdisciplinarity. This generates asymmetries in their exchange, which we illustrate with studies from Oświęcim/Auschwitz (MS) and Cyprus (EIS). By mapping these differences and highlighting collaborative data sessions as a practical arena for building relationships, the article seeks to deepen our understanding of interdisciplinarity and facilitate its practice. (Everyday practice, cultural memory, (in)securitisation, Mode 1 and Mode 2 interdisciplinarity)

This article explores relations between transcultural processes and historical boundaries. Drawing on the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of assemblage, it examines the selection and organisation of cultural elements in a Japanese-styled Chinese New Year installation at a Hong Kong shopping mall. The article presents three affective regimes produced in this transcultural assemblage: New Year festivity, simulated tourism, and partial historicity. We argue that these regimes are regulated in the processes of erasure (the selective blockage of competing lineages of rituals, traditions, and spaces) and forgetting (the process evoking creative re-organisation of semiotic boundaries between cultural elements selected into the transcultural assemblage). This article suggests two implications. First, transculturality is not only the dialogic transgression and creation of boundaries but also the selection and regulation of cultural elements in an assemblage. Second, historical boundaries are not sidestepped but are regulated by the partial blockage through erasure and re-organisation through forgetting in affective regimes. (Transculturality, assemblage, affective regime, erasure, forgetting, Hong Kong)

Long an immigrant society, whether Hong Kong welcomes ethnic minorities remains debatable. Combining Wesselmann and colleagues’ (2016) social exclusion framework, raciolinguistics, and interview data, this study investigates the social exclusion experience of Hong Kong's African economic and student migrants. The findings show that African immigrants who lack linguistic capacity are ostracised in different areas of life. Impolite language usage stigmatises them as poor and ghost-like and stereotypes them as refugees. Taking a raciolinguistic perspective, however, this study finds that race, rather than language, is the root cause of social exclusion. Lastly, the study shows that African migrants manifest agency in ameliorating marginalisation through various activities, revealing the bidirectional nature of social exclusion. Overall, this study empirically enriches the current understanding of Africans’ social exclusion experiences in Hong Kong through the lens of language. It theoretically contributes to the current discussion on raciolinguistics by extending it to the Asian context. (Social exclusion, Hong Kong, African immigrants, verbal rejection, non-verbal rejection, racism, raciolinguistics)*

Clyne has shown great skill in compiling and editing this volume; it contains a wealth of information on language planning and language policies, and will be widely cited in the future. The book contains fourteen case studies, apparently specially commissioned, on corpus language planning from a wide range of societies in a number of global regions: Southeast and East Asia (China, the Philippines, Vietnam), Western Europe (Belgium, Germany, Norway), Eastern Europe (Hungary, Moldavia, Ukraine), the Balkans (the former Yugoslavia), the Middle East (Turkey, Israel, Jordan), Southern Africa (South Africa), and Central America (Nicaragua), as well as the Jewish diaspora (in the case of Yiddish).