Reports of the death of heterogeneity in British speech have been greatly exaggerated. Most Language in Society readers are certainly already aware of this, and two recent books will help communicate this point to people outside the field.

The politics of English is an oddly unifying book. If one were to wonder what Fairclough and Tannen, Bernstein and Saussure, Crystal and Kress, the Milroys and Foucault, Kachru and the British Council, Hume and Pennycook, Conrad and Fishman, Pinker and Chomsky, Cheshire and Trudgill, Holmes and Schiffrin, Lakoff and Labov, and a rather lengthy roster of others have in common, it would be the scorn for their work manifested by Holborow. This low esteem is based on the failure of these scholars to have given Marx and Engels, Voloshinov, and (“some”) Vygotsky a careful enough reading. In the author's view, there is little to be said – not just about English or the politics of English, but about applied linguistics, discourse, and sociolinguistics more generally – that was not already laid down by these very few authorized writers. This book will find few readers within these fields, I would think, since most of the practitioners would find the arguments made against their work oddly authoritarian, coming as they do from an author who argues that a materialist, economic argument is the only valid one.

In this book, Nardini presents “a ‘thick description’ of the Collandia Ladies' Club” from an ethnographic, feminist perspective (p. 127). Using data she gathered as a participant observer in this women's auxiliary to an Italian-American men's club in Chicago, Nardini shows that “examining language use in this ‘community of practice’ allows us to revise our notions of women as powerless users of language” (128). In fact, these immigrant and first-generation Lucchese-American club women are shown to wield a considerable amount of power over one another and over the men in the club by using communicative tactics such as indirect speech to support the cultural norms of the club community.

This book sets out to describe the Spanish language as it is used in the world today, including regional and social variation, pedagogical and political issues, mass media and communication, and language planning. The book is divided into nine chapters, a glossary, and a bibliography.

This is an English version of the author's French work, Atlas géographique des langues et des ethnies de l'Inde et du Subcontinent, (Les Presses de l'Université Laval, Québec, 1976.) Since it was originally based on data from the 1971 (or even earlier) censuses of India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka (and since Bangladesh was part of Pakistan in 1971, and Bhutan data were not reliable earlier), it has been updated to include data from various regional census sources, mostly those conducted in 1981 and 1991. One notes that there are various censuses of Nepal (1952/54, 1971, 1981, 1991) cited, but that Sri Lanka does not seem to have done one since 1953. The cartographic techniques have also benefited from this updating, with new methods of representation not previously available. This makes it possible to compare various increases of speakers and languages in various parts of the subcontinent, in tables added for this purpose. This version also includes a very useful bibliography of sources – not only various censuses, but also other studies of language distribution, language classification, ethnicity, and language issues. There are also a language classification and plate index, a subject and author index, and material on the diffusion of South Asian languages and scripts outside the subcontinent proper.

This book, by a geographer, is a rather complete study of the linguistic behavior of an important population group, the so-called Scheduled Tribes of India, numbering 68 million people in 1991, and more than 90 million today, i.e. as much as the population of Germany – but a population split into distinct units, spread in various patches of territory all over India, where they speak more than 60 indigenous languages. Spatially and culturally divided, they have also long been socially marginalized, and despite many official schemes of development, they are still undergoing a very important process of deculturation. The most noticeable manifestation of this process – the language shift that is the subject of this book – had, at the period of the author's fieldwork, already affected nearly 60% of this population and is leading to the gradual disappearance of local languages in many places.

This is a compendium of articles, originally published elsewhere, that focus on language, education, and culture in Pakistan, where the author has spent most of his career. As he admits in the general introduction, the articles were not initially written as chapters for a book, so they do not each focus on a single argument; but since they have these three themes as they relate to Pakistan as their organizing idea, with few other sources to guide us, we can get some general ideas about these issues as they play out in Pakistan.

A recurring theme in late twentieth century anthropology has been the need to reinvent questions, subject matter, theoretical underpinnings, methods, and ethics central to our research. While all disciplines have their own historical narratives, those told about anthropology are especially fractured along lines of continuity and transformation. Narratives of rupture gained an upper hand during the final decades of the twentieth century, undoubtedly as part of an effort to construct a disciplinary future not so inevitably shaped by forces of a colonial past. But one consequence of imaginative reinvention can be forgetfulness that merges with hubris when we fail to acknowledge how old legacies contribute to current work. Narratives of connection are emerging again, reclaiming a legacy grounded in critical ethnography that engages the lives of real people, partly as a reaction to the detachment of text-based “cultural studies.”