Ronald K. S. Macaulay, Extremely common eloquence: Constructing Scottish identity through narrative. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005. 299. Pb. $81.

The title frames Macaulay's volume concisely. For British English speakers (but perhaps less so for Americans), the collocation “extremely common eloquence” plays on the negative stereotype that M is challenging: that of working-class people as taciturn and inarticulate. In the subtitle we find clues to the “language in use” orientation of the book, the British regional focus, and the primary data.

Michel Paradis, A neurolinguistic theory of bilingualism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004. Pp. 293. Hb $138.00, Pb $39.95.

Researchers and students of applied linguistics and anyone interested in bilingualism and second language learning will find this nontechnical and accessible state-of-the-art survey useful. Regardless of which neurolinguistic theory of bilingualism ends up holding sway, it is in the central nervous system that the core mental operations that underlie language use are materially computed. So, as we do our work, it is good to keep an eye on what's going on here.

In the airline cockpit it is critical to say and do things at the appropriate time and in the appropriate order. When a pilot is responsible for initiating a next action but has not yet done so, the pilot not responsible can prompt or perform the action with talk that is prefaced with and. Rather than make conspicuous another's possible lapse, and-prefaced talk presents the not-yet-initiated action as timely and merely occurring routinely next in sequence. And occurs in talk for monitoring another's conduct and for maintaining accountability in the temporal organization of work by situating actions acceptably in time. This article points to the value of seeing grammatical forms as consequential for just how work gets done in particular settings, and especially for identifying local means of creating order for agenda-based activities. The article analyzes transcriptions of pilots interacting in the cockpit on actual scheduled passenger flights.

Mary J. Schleppegrell, The language of schooling: A functional linguistics perspective. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004. Pp. 190. Hb. $45.00

This is an important contribution to the discussion in the field of educational linguistics on the nature of academic language proficiency. The title itself evokes some of the questions in dispute: What aspects of “language” might the author have in mind? And is there really a different kind that could be said to be “of schooling?” Chap. 1 starts by delimiting the domain of school-related language ability that will be the object of scrutiny: advanced literacy. The skeptic may object that neither “school-related” (in relation to “language”) and “advanced” (in relation to “literacy”) are coherent, well-defined categories. In fact, some educators might go so far as to describe Schleppegrell's analysis as a type of “deficit model” of literacy, a characterization frequently directed toward attempts to differentiate between conversational ability and the kind of language ability required for advanced literacy (see Edelsky 1996). Cummins 2000, for example, has been strongly criticized along these lines.

This article investigates variation in the use of glottalling and glottalization of the voiceless stops (p t k) in an urban variety of British English. Middlesbrough, the locality in question, lies on a regional border in the North of England and has been subject to repeated redrawing of local administrative boundaries and shifting orientations in terms of popular culture. Linguistic trends that converge with North Eastern varieties and diverge from those associated with Yorkshire are correlated with attitudinal information and informants' shifting sense of the identity of the area. Findings reveal socially conditioned variation in perceptions of language and community identity that have clear connections with both the changing sociogeographic status of the urban center and with the linguistic trends uncovered. Results emerging from the attitudinal data offer insight into both the indexical function of the linguistic forms of interest and the motivation for the change in progress in the voiceless stops.

Paul Wald & François Leimdorfer (eds.), Parler en ville, parler de la ville: Essais sur les registres urbains. Paris: Editions UNESCO and Editions de la Maison des sciences de l'homme, 2004. Pp. 276. Hb 27,00 €.

As indicated in the title – which can be translated as Speaking in the city, speaking of the city: Essays on urban registers – this multi-authored French-language collection of essays deals with the interaction of speech and the urban environment. It is the third volume in a recently created French series that aims at understanding the city through the analysis of urban discourse in its historical and sociocultural context. This particular book, co-edited by Paul Wald and François Leimdorfer, highlights the back-and-forth process between the city and speech: on the one hand, the urban environment is constitutive of certain “ways of speaking,” and on the other hand, language plays a role in constructing an image of the city. Both facets of the process are well illustrated in the essays assembled here, which are informed by various disciplines: linguistics, history, anthropology, and sociology.

Graham Furniss, Orality: The power of the spoken word. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pp. vii, 184. Hb $75.00.

Most books written on the subject of orality and literacy are constructed upon an edifice of binary oppositions between the “oral” and the “written” traditions – a typology of supposed differences between the “primitive” or “preliterate” and “civilized” or “modern” cultures. In Orality: The power of the spoken word, Graham Furniss deliberately sets out to flatten this Great Divide that has characterized works of scholars such as Marshall McLuhan and his longtime student Walter J. Ong. On the one hand, there are people like McLuhan who nurse a certain nostalgia for the “premodern” era, arguing that by gaining literacy, society in a sense loses its expressive and sensory existence as a result of the dislocation caused by modern technology. On the other hand, scholars such as Ong view the written text as being in many ways a form of representation superior to the oral because the written word asserts itself (its truth or falsehood) with finality and it is thus a more credible way to communicate. Moreover, Ong sees the written text as having object permanence; it can therefore be easily “re-called” to memory by the reader (Ong 1982:31). Thus, he would argue that the written text occupies a higher level than the oral on the logos hierarchy.

Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen & Cecilia E. Ford (eds.) Sound patterns in interaction: Cross-linguistic studies from conversation. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004. Pp. 404. Hb $156.00.

A successor to Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 1996, this volume contains a similar collection of papers at the interface between phonetics and conversational interaction. There is a lengthy introductory essay by the editors, followed by 12 chapters grouped into three broad sections: “Turn-taking,” “Projecting and expanding turns,” and “Connecting across turns.” Each chapter has a separate bibliography, and the volume has a general index. Seven of the contributions describe British or American English, while a further five address the features of German, Finnish, and Japanese. All the contributions represent work carried out strictly within the theoretical framework of Conversation Analysis (CA), an approach that lends itself well to the study of turn-taking.

Roxy Harris and Ben Rampton (eds.), The language, ethnicity and race reader. London & New York: Routledge, 2003. Pp. x, 357. Pb $38.98.

Harris & Rampton's collection of 25 classic and current articles on language and ethnicity is a welcome tool for the undergraduate-level instructor who requires an astute collection with diverse theoretical and historical perspectives. The introduction guides teachers and students toward theoretical implications of the articles and offers a number of organizational suggestions for how to “read.” The book is first organized into three sections: “Colonialism, imperialism, and global process,” “Nation states and minorities,” and “Language discourse and ethnic style.” In turn, each of the sections proceeds historically along a continuum: premodern → modern → postmodern. For pedagogical purposes, the editors supply a table locating each of the excerpts in its place along this continuum – “a gross oversimplification” to spark debate, for which they hope the readers will take them to task (p. 6).

Dennis Tedlock (translator and interpreter), Rabinal Achi: A Mayan drama of war and sacrifice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. vii, 361. Hb $35.00

The Rabinal Achi, a colonial text of the K'iche'-speaking Maya of Rabinal, Guatemala, is an unusual document for a number of reasons. For one, it is a lengthy text of a Maya dance drama concerning historical events before the Spanish conquest. The content is almost entirely pre-Hispanic and concerns such themes as courtly elite behavior and the arraignment and execution of a prisoner, the rebellious K'iche' war leader Cawek of the Forest People. For the colonial period, there is no Maya dramatic text of comparable length and complexity. However, as a dance drama, the Rabinal Achi is as much a performance as it is a text. Although early colonial forms must have existed, the earliest known version dates to 1850, the manuscript recorded by Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg. Brasseur came to Rabinal in 1855, soon after he acquired the famed K'iche' epic Popol Vuh. While temporarily serving as the parish priest in Rabinal, Brasseur learned of the Rabinal Achi drama. Although he did not obtain the manuscript then owned by Bartolo Sis, he was able to transcribe the K'ichean text. In addition, Brasseur helped revive the dramatic performance, which he witnessed in 1856, the first time it had been played in some 30 years. As it turns out, his 1862 publication of the Rabinal Achi in French and the Achi dialect of K'iche' also helped ensure the continuity of the drama in Rabinal, as Brasseur sent a copy of the book to his assistant in Rabinal, Nicolas Lopez. Transcribed versions of the Achi K'iche' text from the Brasseur edition of 1862 have continued to be used by dance masters in Rabinal to this day.

Michelle M. Lazar (ed.), Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis: Gender, power and ideology in discourse. Houndmills, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. xi, 260. Hb $75.00.

As the title suggests, this is a collection of feminist work carried out within the paradigm of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), which Michelle Lazar glosses in her editor's introduction as “a critical perspective on unequal social relations sustained through language use” (p. 1). It does not seem to be a goal of the book to develop a distinctively feminist variant of CDA, or to engage in dialogue with its leading theorists (most of whom are men, and tend to be politically pro-feminist but not deeply influenced by feminism in a theoretical sense). Rather, contributors use established CDA methods to address questions about gender as one case of “unequal social relations sustained through language use.” That in itself is not a new endeavor – gender features as one topic in most books and edited collections of CDA, and it is also the theme of numerous journal articles – but this, perhaps surprisingly, is the first book-length volume specifically dedicated to the subject.

David McNeill, Gesture and thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 318. Hb $38.00.

I am a visual and tactile learner myself, and so David McNeill's latest work, Gesture and thought, makes bone deep (or perhaps, following McNeill, brain deep) sense to me. His main argument is that language and gesture are inextricably entwined. He sees “gestures as active participants in speaking and thinking. They are conceived of as ingredients in an imagery-language dialect that fuels speech and thought” (p. 3). He looks closely at how gesture and speech coexist in narrative, presents transcription methods suitable to capturing their interdependence, and, perhaps most importantly, lays out the intellectual framework for why a dynamic, double vision of language is essential to understanding the nature of interactions.

Wendy Ayres-Bennett, Sociolinguistic variation in seventeenth-century French: Methodology and case studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xii, 267. Hb $95.00

Wendy Ayres-Bennett (WAB hereafter) is a British French-language scholar, well known to philologists and historical grammarians. She is an authority on 17th-century language matters, in particular on Vaugelas and the remarqueurs (authors of observations on le bon usage, destined for those wishing to speak good French at a time when it was the mother tongue of a minority living in France). In this most recent contribution, she departs from preconceived ideas and typical disciplinary boundaries by using sociolinguistics to look at the history of the language in a project that brings to mind the work of Milroy 1992 on English and Lodge 1993, 2004 on French.

Fèlix Martí, Paul Ortega, Itziar Idiazabal, Andoni Barreña, Patxi Juaristi, Carme Junyent, Belen Uranga and Estibaliz Amorrortu (eds.), Words and worlds: World languages review. Clevedon, Buffalo, & Toronto: UNESCO Etxea and Multilingual Matters, 2005. Pp. xv, 328. Hb. $89.95

This volume reports on the World Languages Review Project, financed by the Basque Government in cooperation with UNESCO. The project's technical committee members have coauthored much of the book, with highlighted contributions from experts from around the globe. Content is based on responses to open questionnaires, distributed through the project committees' networks to individuals knowledgeable on the linguistic situation of each of the 525 languages considered. Other data come from continental meetings, expert consultations, publications, catalogues, atlases, and language centers. This information is analyzed in 12 chapters describing aspects of diversity, indices of vitality and/or decay, and key domains for language maintenance. Chapters conclude with recommendations for the development of language policy. In these ways, the authors achieve their goal of increasing awareness and “appeal[ing] to the responsibility of everyone” (p. xii) to protect languages around the world.

Carol A. Padden & Tom L. Humphries, Inside Deaf culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. 224. Hb $22.95.

Since its publication in 1988, Padden & Humphries's book Deaf in America: Voices from a culture (Harvard University Press) has been an important resource for people studying American Sign Language, Deaf studies, and the linguistics of signed languages. The book sheds light on the Deaf experience and on how American Deaf people construct themselves through stories and language play, including poetry and jokes. It is a positive, at times humorous window into Deaf culture and identity. Harvard University Press has just released the authors' much-anticipated second book, reviewed here. Although it is just as informative, engaging, and well-researched as their first book, Inside Deaf culture examines a much bleaker aspect of Deaf America: its encounter with hearing hegemony.

Schneider, Edgar W., Kate Burridge, Bernd Kortmann, Rajend Mesthrie, & Clive Upton (eds.), A handbook of varieties of English: A multimedia reference tool. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004. Vol. 1, xvii, 1168 pp.; vol. 2, xvii, 1226 pp. Hb/CD-ROM $720.

These two volumes and CD-ROM form an impressive and informative survey of all major English varieties currently spoken. The aim, in the words of the editors, is “documenting and mapping the structural variation among (spontaneously spoken) non-standard varieties of English.” Various standard Englishes, such as Received Pronunciation (RP), are also described, although it is not clear how the editors distinguished a national standard from a national variety. These standard varieties are used as “implicit standard[s] of comparison” for most varieties. Although this perspective might seem surprising in a descriptive work, upon further thought this explicit acknowledgment is refreshing. In many studies, the use of a standard variety for comparison usually remains implicit, rather than being acknowledged at the outset.

Robert D. Greenberg, Language and identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and its disintegration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. x, 188.

This book is an important contribution to the field of Serbo-Croatian and Balkan studies, as well as to general sociolinguistics. In a world that is reconfiguring its identities quite drastically, Greenberg targets one of the most complex, sensitive, and politically charged areas, that of the former Yugoslavia. The whole book attends closely to the unfolding drama of a people whose linguistic fate has followed various controversial attempts to keep the Serbo-Croatian language united, ultimately leading to its disintegration and the emergence of the languages of the relatively recently established new national entities. These are the outcome of the breakup of Yugoslavia: Serbia-Montenegro, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina (not to mention the predominantly non-Slavic-speaking ethno-geographical units).

Randall Holme, Literacy: An introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. Pp. xii, 272. Hb. £18.99.

This text is not just an introduction to literacy; it is an argument for a particular way to understand literacy. For the author, literacy is best understood through a combination of approaches that address its complex and multifaceted nature. These approaches encompass the socioeconomic nature of literacy, literacy understood as visual and linguistic sign usage, and literacy as mental construct. Within the book, each approach is outlined in detail and critiqued. In each case, the critique is integral to the author's claim that single perspectives provide partial accounts of literacy. Together, these approaches are said to enable literacy to be more fully understood as “the interaction of social practice and mind through the medium of sign” (p. 239).

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.

Kwok-kan Tam & Timothy Weiss (eds.), English and globalization: Perspectives from Hong Kong and mainland China. Hong Kong: China University Press, 2005. Pp. ix, 276. Hb $35.00.

“Has English become the ‘cultural SARS’ and ‘king of terrorists’ for Chinese people? Are we Chinese really facing a new ‘Opium War’ against English?” ask the authors of a recently published book, The English demon (Zhu & Yang 2004), which denounces English as a new form of opium, invoking the painful image of the history of Western invasion of China. Comparing English to opium, a substance that is believed to have been used by the Western imperialists to intoxicate the Chinese people and to have caused two wars between China and Britain, is a clear indication of growing hostility toward English in China. At a time when China has just joined the World Trade Organization, has successfully competed for the opportunity to host the 2008 Olympic Games, and is rapidly growing into a powerful global economy, the hostility toward English seems puzzling. After all, English is the language for international trade and communications and thus a necessary medium for China to express its desire for globalization. Why this resentment, then?