In many bilingual and multilingual communities, certain communicative practices are code-specific in that they conventionally require, and are constituted in part through, the speaker's use of a particular code. Code-specific communicative practices, in turn, simultaneously constitute and partake of code-specific genres: normative, relatively stable, often metapragmatically salient types of utterance, or modes of discourse, that conventionally call for use of a particular code. This article suggests that the notions of code specificity and code-specific genre can be useful ones for theorizing the relationship between code and communicative practice in bilingual/multilingual settings, particularly those in which language shift and other contact-induced processes of linguistic and cultural change tend to highlight that relationship. This is demonstrated through an examination of how young children in St. Lucia are socialized to “curse” and otherwise assert themselves by means of a creole language that under most circumstances they are discouraged from using.The fieldwork on which this article is based was supported by the Fulbright Program, the National Science Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; immediate post-fieldwork support was provided by the Spencer Foundation. The work time necessary for writing this article was made possible by a Temple University Presidential Research Incentive Summer Fellowship, a Temple University Research/Study Leave, and a Wenner-Gren Foundation Richard Carley Hunt Fellowship. For their comments on a much briefer earlier version (presented at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association), I thank Bambi Schieffelin, Patricia Baquedano-López, and Leslie Moore. For comments on this version, I am grateful to Jane Hill and two anonymous reviewers. I am solely responsible for any and all shortcomings.

Following the return of sovereignty from Britain to China, Hong Kong has undergone significant sociopolitical and educational changes. This study is a quantitative investigation of the language attitudes of 1,048 secondary students from the first postcolonial generation brought up amid the significant changes after the political handover. The results show that the respondents feel the most integratively inclined to Cantonese (the vernacular variety), and they perceive English (the colonizers' language) as the language of the highest instrumental value and social status, while Putonghua (the language of the new ruler) is rated the lowest from both the integrative and the instrumental perspectives. Unlike what has been predicted by scholars, Putonghua has not yet taken the place of English as the language of power. Despite this, there are signs of a subtle transition toward an accommodating attitude to Putonghua, mainly induced by the growing instrumental value of the language for economic purposes.

This article explores the interconnection between grammar and the performance of preferred and dispreferred responses in Japanese. As is well known, dispreferred format turns are structurally more complex than preferred format turns, regularly delayed, accompanied by prefaces and accounts, mitigated, or made indirect. Owing to the flexibility of Japanese grammar, participants have expanded intra-turn capacity to maximize or minimize compliance with such formats. On one extreme, a dispreferred action can be massively delayed until near the turn-ending through opting for so-called canonical predicate-final word order and minimization of ellipsis. On the other extreme, a preferred action can be expedited to the very opening of a turn through non-canonical predicate-initial word order by taking advantage of word order variability and ellipsis. Such syntactic practices are interactionally managed for calibrating the timing of social action. It emerges that the canonical word order – assumed to be the generically unmarked alternative – is actually optimally tailored for the implementation of marked (dispreferred) responses, as opposed to a non-canonical word order for unmarked (preferred) responses, in the given sequential environment.

Recent sociolinguistic studies have given increased attention to the situated practice of members of locally based communities. Linguistic variation examined tends to fall on a continuum between a territorially based “standard” variety and a regional or ethnic vernacular. This article emphasizes the need for sociolinguistics, especially variationist sociolinguistics, to look beyond strictly local contexts and to go beyond treating variation as located along a linear dimension of standard and vernacular. Based on quantitative analysis of four phonological variables among Chinese professionals in foreign and state-owned companies in Beijing, this study demonstrates that professionals in foreign businesses employ linguistic resources from both local and global sources to construct a new cosmopolitan variety of Mandarin, whereas their counterparts in state-owned businesses favor the use of local features. The study shows that variation does not just reflect existing social categories and social change, but is a resource for constructing those categories and participates in social change.This article is based on data collected during my dissertation research on Chinese business professionals, conducted in 1997–1998 in Beijing. The research was funded by several organizations at Stanford University: Graduate Research Opportunity Funds from the School of Humanities and Sciences, a Graduate Dissertation Fellowship from the Institute of Research on Women and Gender, and a Dissertation Grant for the Study of Women in Asia from the Center for East Asian Studies. My special thanks to Penelope Eckert and Keith Walters for their valuable suggestions on various versions of this article. I would also like to thank Miyako Inoue for her insightful comments on my analysis of the linguistic markets in the Chinese context. I am grateful for the valuable suggestions and comments from Jane Hill, editor of Language and Society, and two anonymous reviewers. I would also like to thank Jane McGary, the editorial assistant of LIS, for her editorial support. My research and this article would not have been possible without the Chinese professionals who agreed to share their experiences and time with me during my fieldwork. All remaining errors are my own.

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.

Elinor Ochs & Lisa Capps, Living narrative: Creating lives in everyday storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. xii, 352. Pb. $20.50.

Imagine a book on conversational narrative that draws from the fields of linguistics, psychology, literary theory, and anthropology. Now, imagine this book as compelling as a favorite novel and as convincing as a well-designed research report. The nexus of these fields and the artful marriage of these vastly varying genres can be found in the profoundly interdisciplinary and genuinely collaborative book Living narrative. In this volume, Elinor Ochs, a linguistic anthropologist, and Lisa Capps, a developmental psychologist, speak both to those who come to narrative with literary concerns, and to those discourse-analytic minded social scientists who understand spoken, personal narrative as a means to link linguistic phenomena to development of culture and society. Through the course of the book, the authors illustrate how these literary and social concerns need not be dichotomous. Living narrative instills a simultaneous appreciation for the aesthetic and the political aspects of everyday conversational narrative.

Eve V. Clark, First language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi, 515. Hb $90.

Eve Clark's comprehensive book makes an important addition to those works already available on first language acquisition. A commendable feature is the inclusion of many non-English examples, although most are from English. In the field of language acquisition there has been an emphasis on cross-language comparisons over the past few years, as shown by the number of journal articles and chapters published, but there has not been a comprehensive single-authored book which has attempted to incorporate the recent cross-language findings. Clark's work goes a long way to filling this gap.

Myra Macdonald, Exploring media discourse. London: Arnold, 2003. Pp. vi, 213. Pb $24.95.

This book makes for fascinating but challenging reading. It is fascinating in that it covers wide-ranging and controversial topics such as racism; politicians, and their private and public spheres; and risks, covering those associated with children, food, Islam, and September 11.

Kay McCormick, Language in Cape Town's District Six. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. xv + 253 pp.

Kay McCormick's book is a multifaceted analysis of language norms and language practices in the bilingual District Six of Cape Town (South Africa). District Six is probably the best-known inner city neighborhood of Cape Town: In the 1980s the eyes of the world witnessed the forced removal of many of its inhabitants and the brutal demolition of homes in yet another attempt by the apartheid government to get rid of a cosmopolitan and ethnically mixed area. The area is relatively well defined, and its language contact situation makes it an excellent site for the study of language alternation and code-switching.

Esma Gregor, Russian-English code-switching in New York City. Frankfurt/M. & Berlin: Peter Lang. Pp. 195. Hb $32.95

This doctoral dissertation focuses on Russian-English bilingualism and code-switching in New York City, applying the main functional models in code-switching research to data gathered in a field study the author conducted between 1998 and 2000. The data are quantified, and an attempt is made to correlate the linguistic competence of the speakers with their code-switching behavior.

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