This important book – hereafter DSE – demonstrates for all linguists how an insightful observation by a young scholar can question basic assumptions and fondly held beliefs. In 1996, Laura Wright published an essay in a Festschrift for Eric Stanley in which she pointed to the fragility of the received wisdom that the modern prestige dialect of Britain emerged from a medieval “Central Midland” progenitor brought to London from the north and promulgated through the scribes in the Court of Chancery. In 1997, a conference was held in Cambridge to pursue the questions she had raised; then, in 1999, further discussion at the University of London led to this volume.

The first quotation on the back cover of this book begins, “This long-awaited volume demonstrates that Eckert is the sociolinguist.” Some people have expressed the view that this is an unusually strong statement. Since I wrote it myself, I am faced with the clear choice in this review of defending it or apologizing for it.

Characterizing the discourse functions of linguistic expressions is surely one of the most difficult tasks in linguistic analysis. The starting point for any study of discourse functions is the examination of naturally occurring data; the limiting factor is the lack of well-developed theoretical frameworks for understanding language use. Still, a good descriptive study has lasting value, and empirical claims invite further analysis. Overstreet's study of the “general extenders” or something, and everything, and other members of this class makes a solid contribution on both fronts.

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.

This is an impressive, fascinating, and exasperating work of scholarship, based on an astonishingly exhaustive survey of manuscript codices produced in the British Isles and western continental Europe between the 7th and the 13th centuries. Saenger traces the transition from continuous to word-divided script, which, he contends, reflects a fundamental shift in style from reading aloud to reading silently.

The central claim of Ideophones and sound symbolism in Atlantic creoles is that ideophones constitute a relevant category in Atlantic creoles, and that they show both functional and substantial correspondences with ideophones in African languages. The book consists of two main parts: a critical review of the literature on ideophones (Introduction; Chap. 1, “Previous treatment of ideophones and sound symbolism in the literature”; Chap. 2, “Characterization of ideophones: towards a cross-linguistic prototype”), and an etymological database of ideophones in the Atlantic creoles (Chap. 3, “The use of ideophone in the Atlantic creoles and their tentative etymologies”). Two appendices present data sources and the approximate number of ideophones in some languages. The study is based on the available literature, supplemented by data on Atlantic creoles, African languages, European languages, and two Asian languages that was obtained either from specialists on certain languages or from first-language speakers.

Latin language and Latin culture is a short, concentrated treatise on the Latin language and its impact, past and present, on those who have come in contact with it. The author is not a linguist, nor is this book written in any way as a contribution to the linguistics or sociolinguistics of Latin. If it were being reviewed from the perspective of Classical philology and literary theory in which it is written, the assessment of it would be very different from the evaluation that follows; so in a sense, my review is biased a priori in that I can approach the issues it raises only from a perspective that is wholly different from that of the author. Nonetheless, a book about language and culture invites the attention of the linguist, and we would be derelict if we were to dismiss it as linguistically uninteresting. Indeed, it is both interesting and provocative.

This statement is an opening point for the discussion on the effects of the dominance of English as a language of science on other languages and speech communities. The global search for a common auxiliary language that allows unprecedented possibilities for international cooperation, and the resulting prevalence and dominance of English in science, vary in kind and degree, as well as in effects, across language communities and countries. The volume under review is an outstanding one with respect to both thematic diversity and depth of analysis in most of its essays. Since Fishman et al. 1977 edited the first collection of essays on the spread of English, numerous valuable books on the status of English as a global language have been published (Flaitz 1988, Doyle 1989, Kachru 1992, Pennycook 1994, Hartmann 1996, Fishman et al. 1996, Crystal 1997, Ryan & Zuber-Skerritt 1999), but there is no doubt that Ulrich Ammon has edited an extremely innovative and insightful volume.

An important addition to the growing literature on language ideology, this volume is the fruit of an advanced seminar held in Santa Fe in 1994 at the School of American Research. The seminar brought together some of the leading scholars in language ideology research: Richard Bauman, Charles Briggs, Joseph Errington, Susan Gal, Jane Hill, Judith Irvine, Paul Kroskrity, Susan Philips, Bambi Schieffelin, and Michael Silverstein. Regimes of language consists of revised versions of the papers presented at the seminar.

As stated in the title, the topic of this book is the relationships between language and nationalism in Europe, and particularly the “significance of language for nationalism and national identity” (p. 9) – a topic qualified as “fascinating” by the editors (v) and in Barbour's initial chapter (16, 17). A question arises in the reviewer's mind: Is this a unitary, unequivocal subject? Of course, in a certain rather philosophical way it is unitary – which does not mean general agreement even from this philosophical view, but at least it may be identified as “a proper subject.” However, it is not at all unequivocal insofar as the terms of the relationship are not clarified. This is precisely what Barbour's opening chapter intends.

The strength of this book (henceforth LPLCJ) is that it is filled with information about an important but little-understood aspect of Japanese culture: Japan's stance toward its own language. It takes as its point of departure “the study of language planning as a branch of the sociology of language” (p. 10). For reasons that I will outline below, I find this particular approach unsatisfying, but the book's strengths far outweigh its weaknesses, and I will outline the former here before offering my own opinion on how this topic should be approached.

This book proposes to examine how the development of the city is intrinsically connected with language interactions and social norms. How can one account for social behaviors in urban settings without explaining why such behaviors are specifically urban? The studies collected here aim at expounding how five cities – Rouen (France), Venice (Italy), Berlin (Germany), Athens (Greece), and Mons (Belgium) – are places of tension, conflict, and community sharing through the use of dialectal or sociolectal language varieties.

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).

As eighth-grade students of English in a “periphery” community school in India, we were assigned to discuss and to appreciate a piece of prose, from our textbook, called “On not answering the telephone”; it was a satirical piece demonizing telephones because their existence and use flouted all tenets of British English linguistic etiquette. None of us in that class had a phone in our homes, and none of us had any desire to learn the alien etiquette. We were interested only in learning the language to the extent that it could help us realize our immediate and, perhaps, future goals. This was our tacit response, and resistance, to English linguistic imperialism: awareness of the pragmatic rewards of English-language acquisition and use, but negation and denial of the cultural hegemony of English. This dynamic of ideological imposition and resistance (and appropriation) forms the core of Canagarajah's book, Resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching.

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.

This book is the result of the project Sociolinguistic and Psycholinguistic Aspects of Linguistic Minority Groups in Spain, started in 1993. After the introductory chapter by the editor, the book is divided into four parts, which contain 16 articles on the sociolinguistic situation of a series of established and migrant communities in Spain, viewed from an interdisciplinary standpoint. There are numerous maps and graphics, but no index.

A brief editors'note about the title of this book begins with the following statement: “The title of this volume is an answer to another publication, the UNESCO Red Book on endangered languages.” It ends by making a vow: “We hope this Green Book will be of use to everyone who wants it to be no longer necessary for their language to be listed in the Red Book.

Speaking culturally is designed as a language-oriented introduction to ethnic and gender issues in the United States, concentrating on what the author perceives to be widely unrecognized intercultural communication problems. The text is divided into three sections, with the first – “Language in demographic and cultural perspective” – providing theoretical background on the relationship of speech to community. The second, “Locating cultural discourses,” provides overviews of language and gender and of three ethnic communities: African American, Hispanic and Asian American. The last section, “Language consequences and controversies,” addresses the consequences of linguistic and cultural diversity and current language policy designed to deal with this diversity.

Both volumes under review cover the same topic, turn-taking in Japanese in comparison with English. While Furo compares Japanese and English data, Tanaka focuses on the analysis of Japanese data, but nonetheless keeps a cross-cultural perspective on turn-taking. Both are dealing with a now flourishing area, the interface of grammar and interaction, based on the model of turn-taking proposed by Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson 1974 and the work by Ford & Thompson 1996. Through the study of turn-taking, Tanaka aims at exploring the interrelationship of grammar and interaction, and Furo attempts to reveal how aspects of language – grammar, intonation, and semantics – and interaction influence one another, and how they are intertwined in discourse. Both volumes emerged from doctoral dissertations, Tanaka's at Oxford and Furo's at Georgetown University. Despite many similarities, including some of the findings, their approaches and presentations are quite different.

Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in pidgin and creole languages. One consequence of this is the growing demand for introductory textbooks. Singh's book joins similar introductions by, among others, Arends, Muysken & Smith 1995, Mühlhäusler 1997, and Sebba 1997.