Despite extensive research over the past four decades, a number of issues concerning the historical and current development of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) remain unresolved. This study utilizes a unique sociolinguistic situation – a long-standing, isolated, biracial community situated in a distinctive dialect region of coastal North Carolina – to address questions of localized dialect accommodation and ethnolinguistic distinctiveness in earlier African American English. A comparison of diagnostic phonological and morphosyntactic variables for a sample of four different generations of African Americans and a baseline European American group shows that considerable accommodation of the localized dialect occurred in earlier African American speech. Nonetheless, certain dialect features – e.g., copula absence and 3rd person verbal s marking – were distinctively maintained by African Americans in the face of localized dialect accommodation; and this suggests long-term ethnolinguistic distinctiveness. Cross-generational change among African Americans indicates that younger speakers are moving away from the localized Pamlico Sound dialect toward a more generalized AAVE norm. Contact-based and identity-based explanations are offered for the current trend of localized dialect displacement.

Some of the recent work in the field of media discourse has been concerned with various levels in the organization and structure of audience participation programs on radio and television; other approaches to the analysis of talk in these settings have focused on the interactional frameworks at play in the talk. The aim of this article is to develop the interactional approach by looking at the production of narratives in a mediated context: specifically, the production of a story from two different, and conflicting, points of view. The stories I analyze occur within two different program genres (talk show and television court) where lay members of the public are often called upon to produce accounts of events which are then contested by another participant. This article discusses the significance of tense shifting in these second versions, from narrative past to conversational historic present, in the public construction of believable alternative stories.

Stories provide rich environments for understanding how invitations to action, and responses to them, are delicately managed and consequential for shaping just how “the story” evolves as a form of social organization. The present analysis focuses on seventeen invited collaborations, as “Two guys” co-author gossip about an absent woman, and on the distinct interactional dilemmas that arise as morally indignant references are occasioned, initially avoided, and yet gradually pursued as resources for escalating affiliation and intimacy. At noticeably risky moments, as the story gets reconfigured – from a reporting about “last night,” to sexualized fantasy enacted through stereotypic portrayals of uneducated Southern males – speakers' intoned and animated voices are revealed as methodically deployed, prosodically constructed, and increasingly choral practices for shaping story trajectories: artfully crafted resources for contextualizing and negotiating concerted actions in ordinary conversation. The analysis concludes by addressing the question: Are these gossiping actions “sexist”?

This volume encompasses work by researchers from three distinct but related areas of inquiry: functional linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and conversation analysis. Edited collections sometimes strain to provide a unifying theme connecting diverse contributions into a coherent whole. Happily, the editors and contributors to Interaction and grammar (the list of authors is impressive) have to a large extent solved this problem; and in the process, they have provided an important contribution that should have major impact in all three areas.

As a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s, I took what everyone called the “Grandfathers” course, which provided an overview of the field through the work of individual scholars (Dell Hymes was the professor). It had a more proper title we all ignored, probably “History of linguistics.” Now, The early days of sociolinguistics provides an updated and more complete version of that course, except that it emphasizes sociolinguistics rather than all of linguistics; it presents substantial information about the development of the field, as seen through the eyes of one scholar after another. As we enter the new millennium, the discussion appropriately now includes “grandmothers” as well as “grandfathers.” This has the flavor of salvage linguistics: get the elders to report what they know before they die (or forget), in order to preserve the details for future generations. This goal is perhaps most obviously visible in the selection by Charles Ferguson. It is not a piece he actually contributed; rather, it is constructed from interviews conducted by his friends, colleagues, and students during his recuperation from a series of severe strokes (77). Given the centrality of Ferguson in the history of sociolinguistics – he is “identified by a majority of the contributors as the principal architect for the field” (321) – his inability to write his own summary of events justifies the remainder of the individual histories.

In 1964 the late Harvey Sacks began to present his now-famous lectures on conversation at UCLA (Sacks 1992, vol. 1). By the decade's end, as he continued his lectures at UC Irvine (Sacks 1992, vol. 2), the first published instance of the work that had come to be known as Conversation Analysis (Schegloff 1968) introduced this developing perspective to a broader public. In the early 1970s Sacks and Schegloff, along with their colleague Gail Jefferson, pursued their research on the organization of talk-in-interaction and published a number of articles that remain foundational (e.g. Schegloff & Sacks 1973, Sacks et al. 1974).

The work of Elinor Ochs and Catherine Snow has demonstrated the central importance of dinner talk within a broad picture of language socialization. A fertile site for the intergenerational transmission of cultural values and identities, it fosters culturally specific ways of talking and thinking which have significance for children's lives far beyond the intimacy of family meals. Blum-Kulka brings to this rich speech event her insights about cross-cultural pragmatics and her deep knowledge of patterns of communication in Jewish communities in the US and Israel. What emerges from her multi-year study is a thoroughly Hymesian depiction of cultural continuity and change, as enacted in everyday talk. She demonstrates that the subtle differences and similarities in patterns of dinnertime talk found in each of three middle-class, secular Jewish speech communities of Ashkenazi heritage – Jewish Americans (JA), American immigrants to Israel (AI), and native Israelis (NI) – reflect entangled processes of cultural maintenance, cultural assimilation, and intentional breaks from the traditional values and practices of the Diaspora.

Within the fields of health communication and medical sociology, there is growing interest in exploring the social and interactional character of health and illness. This interest results, in large part, from the recognition that the very foundations of a society's notions of health are inextricably rooted in the social. With the present book, we have one of the first interactional studies of a family's experience with a particular illness: bulimia. Beach provides a glimpse into the way that family members both talk about, and talk into being, the health problems of one of its members. Removing the notion of illness from the individual, psychological experience is not an especially novel idea; but Beach's location of it in the interactional details of a conversation between a grandmother and granddaughter is quite notable.

This book hooks the reader (linguist and non-) through real-life, high-stakes cases and a very readable style. Shuy brings his scholarship and humanity to this work as he introduces us to the communicative event of the confession within the culture of the law enforcement community in the United States. His examples show us how linguists can apply their knowledge and skills. He also speaks to the law enforcement community, and to the interested non-linguist.

The language of science has been extensively studied by linguists and rhetoricians – as a distinctive register, as a set of genres that students and academics need to master, and as a discourse of powerful social institutions. Most of these studies have been synchronic, focusing on the structures or styles of more or less contemporary texts, particularly research articles. But if we rely on such studies, we may tend to reify some features of text (such as the Introduction–Methods–Results–Discussion form, or the tendency to passive constructions and nominalizations) as inevitable features of scientific communication. We may also treat scientific institutions – such as the lines between disciplines, or between professionals and amateurs – as given by the subject matter, rather than seeing them as changing and as constituted in part by their communicative practices.

Investigators of bilingual language acquisition have underscored the fact that the child growing up with two languages provides us with an ideal natural experiment. First, the bilingual child offers welcome opportunities for disentangling general cognitive and specific linguistic development. Second, the investigator can look at different language policies adopted by individual families and caregivers, compare features of the respective input, and relate these features to the child's emerging language systems and communicative behavior. Lanza's book addresses this second set of issues and provides us with valuable insights concerning what she calls “language socialization” and children's early sensitivity toward the acceptability of their language choice.

Since the inception of Labov's variationist approach to the study of linguistic change, there have been two approaches to phonology: one theoretically motivated, addressing relatively invariant idealizations of language; and another empirically motivated, in which language is taken to be fundamentally variable. Since the time of the controversy over the incorporation of probability into grammar in the Variable Rule (VR) model, these two approaches have largely diverged. Critics have expressed skepticism about probabilistic rules, challenged their psychological reality, and rejected the variationist's methods of aggregating speakers (cf. papers collected by Singh 1996). Variationists have responded with improved methods, more thorough demonstrations of variability, and articulations of the relevance of variation to linguistic change (e.g. Labov 1994). The controversy continues today; and as readers of the present volume will see, it has entered new territory.

This collection of articles is the first in a projected series on the topic of language names – glottonyms, or occasionally glossonyms. The present volume owes its impetus to a 1994 colloquium organized by the Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique, Université de Bretagne Occidentale. The book offers a reasonable treatment of general issues, but most of the authors treat European, particularly Western European, cases. As the subtitle of the volume indicates, the focus here is claimed to be largely a social one, having to do with the political, ideological, and social aspects of language naming. The book consists of an introduction by the editor, followed by four sections.

Francophone literature and culture have become the leading area of growth in French studies in the US; thus this broad-ranging critical examination of the notion of francophonie constitutes a timely contribution.

What makes Russians Russian? Is it a special national character, or their common emotional or intellectual spirit? Ries helps us get rid of these slippery essentialist commonplaces with her interpretative anthropological study of Muscovites' everyday private talk around 1990. Her effort is outstanding in both description and theory: Few have undertaken to describe and analyze Russian (or Eastern European) urban everyday discourse from the anthropological perspective, as she does (though recent macro-studies and studies of public discourse are more numerous). At the same time, she creates and defends a thesis of everyday talk as a vital medium of social value creation and maintenance – as it constructs “Russianness,” in her example.

To understand this book, a little background information helps. I first encountered Ali Mazrui in 1968–70 when I was the first lecturer in linguistics at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda; Mazrui, a member of the political science faculty, was already a famous orator, acknowledged by all as possessing “a golden tongue.” Since then, he has gone on to become probably the most famous African studies professor in the United States; he was the presenter of the nine-part BBC/PBS television series The Africans: A triple heritage, and he is the author of many books and articles on Africa. He has taught at many universities around the world, and is now director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies and Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at the State University of New York at Binghamton. His junior co-author (a relative?), Alamin M. Mazrui, was trained as a linguist and is an associate professor of Black studies at Ohio State University. Both are native speakers of Swahili from Mombasa, Kenya (they prefer to refer to the language as Kiswahili, with its noun class prefix, as it would be if one were speaking the language itself). Kiswahili, of course, is probably the best-known African language; many people in East Africa and other areas (e.g. the Democratic Republic of Congo) speak it as a second language. Furthermore, it is one of the few indigenous languages with official status in an African nation; it is the official language of Tanzania, and the co-official language in Kenya along with English. However, Kiswahili is spoken natively mainly along the East African coastline and on the offshore islands (e.g. Zanzibar), often by persons with a dual Arabic-African heritage similar to that of the Mazruis.

According to feminist writings, Islamic women lack agency and power, and are oppressed compared to their Western female counterparts. A major site of such oppression is in Islamic courts, where husbands possess authority to pronounce divorce – while their subordinate wives humbly accept the decree and persevere, silently enduring the hardships that result. In stark contrast to such stereotypic images of gender relations in Islamic societies, Hirsch's beautifully written and powerful book focuses on the discursive production and reproduction of gender in Swahili Muslim courts. In so doing, it offers a quite different view of gender relations in Islamic society. In rich, fine-grained linguistic detail, Hirsch analyzes how legal processes in divorce cases not only reproduce but also undermine and transform dominant cultural images of gender.

This is a very personal book, a poignant book, a compelling book, from beginning to end. The Preface sets the tone: self-reflexive and confessional. Wilce once wanted to be a medical doctor; he became instead a missionary in Bangladesh, but felt “guilt and pervasive disquiet” in that role; and while in Bengal – actually, in neighboring Calcutta – he suffered a “nightmarish” family tragedy involving medical practitioners. He later resigned from the mission and went to graduate school; then he returned to Bangladesh to study complaint and lament as expressed in one locality within the Bangla-speaking area. (“Bangla” and “Bengali” are two names for the same language. Wilce refers to the language as Bangla; so shall I.)

Although Indonesia's New Order has been thrown into disorder recently, its project of engineering an Indonesian language has been deemed a miraculous success. At Indonesian independence in 1945, the artificial administrative Malay language – used by the Dutch to administer their East Indies colonial empire – was just one of several dialects of a language spoken natively by only a few million residents of the territory. Now its descendant, Indonesian, is a “fully viable, universally acknowledged national language … clearly ascendant over hundreds of languages spoken natively among more than two hundred million Indonesians” (p. 2). Errington, author of two earlier books on Javanese, here turns his attention to that modernist state project of building Indonesian, and to evolving patterns of bilingualism among the Javanese, the demographically and politically dominant ethnic community of Indonesia. He gives us not only a detailed analysis of language use, but also a fascinating ethnographic account of Indonesian national development as it is interactionally constituted in two aptly chosen villages in the region around Solo (Surakarta). This study exemplifies an ethnographically grounded, culturally nuanced approach to bilingualism and language change.

Karl Kroeber is a distinguished professor of English at Columbia University and the son of a distinguished anthropologist, Alfred Louis Kroeber. He has been listening to Native American stories since his boyhood, and writing about them (side by side with his work on the English Romantics) for roughly twenty years. An anthology he edited in 1981, Traditional American Indian literatures: Texts and interpretations, taught me much when it appeared, and a statement Kroeber made in the introduction to that volume has stayed with me ever since. “It is our scholarship,” he wrote, “not Indian literature, which is primitive or underdeveloped.”