Stephen J. Caldas, Raising bilingual-biliterate children in monolingual cultures. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2006. Pp. xvi, 231. Pb. $39.95.

This is the fascinating story of the author's own family project of raising his three children French-English bilingually in English-speaking Louisiana. Caldas, a French-English bilingual himself, and his bilingual French-Canadian wife artificially orchestrate and manipulate the children's environments from birth to adolescence to ensure that the children develop full bilingual proficiency and biliteracy in French and English. Caldas's and his wife's main strategy is to speak only French to their son and their identical twin daughters. They also commit to use only French with each other, thus creating an all-French-speaking home environment. The Caldases also enroll the children in French immersion school and make extensive use of French-language media to further expose the children to French. Finally, the author and his wife purchase a cottage in Quebec where they spend the summers, providing the children with authentic societal language immersion. The outcome of this extraordinary experiment is that, by adolescence, all three children are completely bilingual and biliterate in French and English and can be easily mistaken as native speakers of both Quebecois French and American English.

Peter Garrett, Nikolas Coupland & Angie Williams, Investigating language attitudes: Social meanings of dialect, ethnicity and performance. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003. x + 251 pp. Hb $79.95.

As its title suggests, this book focuses on attitudes to language and dialect production, perception, and use, and particularly on attitudes to language variation, dialect, speech style, language preference, and minority languages as well as their speakers. As we know, an important aspect of the complex social psychology of speech communities is the arbitrary and subjective intellectual and emotional response of a society's members to the languages and varieties in their social environment: Different language varieties are often associated with deep-rooted emotional responses – social attitudes, in short – such as thoughts, feelings, stereotypes, and prejudices about people, about social, ethnic and religious groups, and about political entities. These emotional responses and perceptions of language and dialect phenomena are biased by cultural, social, political, economic, or historical facts or other circumstances within the speech community. Sociolinguistically based research may build 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 within the community, and may further understanding of the dynamics of speech communities as well as of the subjective life of language varieties.

In Sista, speak! Sonja Lanehart presents the language and literacy autobiographies of three generations of African American women. These women tell the stories of their education and aspirations, focusing on how their literacy and language were influenced by social, economic, and political forces within school, family and community. Lanehart interprets the rich descriptions in their stories by examining the ideological perspectives of “experiences and cultures and ecologies” that shaped the women's views of themselves and their worlds” (p. 29).

This volume contributes to the study of language ideology by focusing on the historical processes through which ideological positions about the relationship of language and society are produced and reproduced. Specifically, the contributors seek to contextualize the ways that language ideologies are contested in particular, often well publicized debates about language and its relationships to society. While ostensibly about linguistic issues, these debates, at one level or another, also address questions of power and national identity.

Coulmas's new book, Writing systems, is intended as a textbook for use in upper-level undergraduate and graduate-level courses dealing with written languages and literacy from the standpoint of linguistics and anthropology. The book provides an excellent and comprehensive introduction to the linguistic analysis of writing, and it offers detailed illustrations of the world's major writing systems and their social consequences, ranging from the birth of graphic signs as mnemonics to social stratification resulting from issues of literacy in modern society. Geared particularly toward the interests of linguists, the book places strong emphasis on the multiple levels of the form-sound nexus and the structural complexities of various writing systems around the world. It is accompanied by a concise exposition of the history of writing and a review of current investigations into reading and writing in psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics. Overall, Coulmas does a first-rate job of linking the origin, development, and spread of writing to the growing interest in the linguistically motivated analysis of writing and its relation to the mind and society. Although the chapters cut across several layers of writing analysis, the historical, educational, and ideological issues of literacy are given less attention than might be expected, owing to the author's focus on the linguistic aspects of writing. At the end of each chapter, exercises are provided for mastery of basic concepts and issues discussed.

Dagmar Dueber, Nigerian Pidgin English: Language contact, variation and change in an African urban setting. London: Battlebridge, 2005. Pp. xiii, 273. Pb £25.

This is a corpus-based study of Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) among the educated in the urban center of Lagos. Deuber's report on the use of NPE in Lagos makes for interesting comparison with the spread and use of other contact varieties in urban areas in Africa (e.g., Sheng in Nairobi; see Fink 2005 and references therein) and its impact on indigenous languages. It is also comparable with the discussions of urban varieties of creoles reported in Patrick's (1999) work and more recently in Hackert 2004. One of the obvious issues is the functioning of the variety in new public formal domains. Issues related to both corpus and status planning are discussed (cf. Devonish 1986). To help the reader navigate the vast amount of data, there are several maps, sample questionnaires, and complete transcriptions from elicitations and interviews. The included CD contains sociodemographic data for all the informants and background information on the texts, translations, and sound samples. The book should prove beneficial to sociolinguists of varying persuasions, especially creolists, variationists, and discourse analysts.

This is a collection of twenty matchless essays on the subject of language contact (Quechua, Guaraní, and occasionally Aymara in contact with Spanish). The first one serves as an introduction to the main theme and as a justification for the author's rejection of certain methodologies. “Observaciones metodológicas sobre la investigación sociolingüística en Hispanoamérica” (pp. 7–18) offers an excellent review of stratificational sociolinguistics, a field the author proves to know but prefers to discard on the basis of its inadequacy for studying marginalized Amerindian communities. The major deterrent is the application of quantitative methods to populations that do not belong to post-industrialized societies, where the continua of social strata and sociolinguistic variables are more easily grasped with contemporary methods of the social sciences. In contrast, groups in Latin American societies display wider socio-economic and socio-political gaps, not to mention massive peripheral strata.

Discourse constructions of youth identities is an eclectic collection of 12 papers which examine the language of youth in England, Greece, Turkey, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Japan. The authors use various methodologies, including narrative analysis, conversational analysis, sociolinguistics, and Critical Discourse Analysis, to look at the language practices of youth ranging in age from nine years to the early twenties. In addition to studies of spontaneous peer group interaction in schools and youth centers, the volume also includes work on various kinds of expressive culture, focus group interactions, and interviews.