This article investigates the role of script choice in bilingual writing, drawing on classified advertisements and other texts written for and by Russian-speaking immigrants in New York City. The study focuses on English-origin items that appear in Russian texts, which are found to be written either in roman or Cyrillic script. Through an investigation of categorical and variable constraints on this variation, it is found that script choice relates to the distinction between lexical borrowing and single-item codeswitching. It is argued that writers may, consciously and on a token-by-token basis, choose the Cyrillic script to mark a word as borrowed or the roman script to mark it as foreign. However, they may also avoid this choice, as hybrid forms attest, especially when the use of characters shared by both alphabets allows ambiguous readings. The findings thus have implications for understanding notions of language boundaries in bilingual language use.Versions of this article were presented at two conferences: “Alphabetics: Interpreting letters” at Harvard University, 26–27 April 2003, and NWAVE 32, Philadelphia, 9–12 October 2003. I thank the audiences for their valuable insights and observations, especially Erika Boeckeler and Daniel Kokin. I also owe thanks to Katya Korsunskaya, Vladislav Rapoport, Doris Stolberg, Mario Geiger, and Tobias Kuhn. I am grateful to John Victor Singler, Mark Sebba, and Jannis K. Androutsopoulos, as well as to Jane H. Hill and to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. All errors and omissions remain my own.

“Creole Exceptionalism” is defined as a set of beliefs, widespread among both linguists and nonlinguists, that Creole languages form an exceptional class on phylogenetic and/or typological grounds. It also has nonlinguistic (e.g., sociological) implications, such as the claim that Creole languages are a “handicap” for their speakers, which has undermined the role that Creoles should play in the education and socioeconomic development of monolingual Creolophones. Focusing on Caribbean Creoles, and on Haitian Creole in particular, it is argued that Creole Exceptionalism, as a sociohistorically rooted “régime of truth” (in Foucault's sense), obstructs scientific and social progress in and about Creole communities. Various types of Creole Exceptionalist beliefs are deconstructed and historicized, and their empirical, theoretical, and sociological flaws surveyed. These flaws have antecedents in early creolists' theories of Creole genesis, often explicitly couched in Eurocentric and (pre-/quasi-)Darwinian doctrines of human evolution. Despite its historical basis in colonialism and slavery and its scientific and sociological flaws, Creole Exceptionalism is still enshrined in the modern linguistics establishment and its classic literature, a not unexpected state given the social structure of scientific communities and the interaction between ideology and “paradigm-making.” The present Foucauldian approach to Creole Exceptionalism is an instantiation of a well-defined area of the linguistics/ideology interface. The conclusion proposes alternatives more consistent with Creole structures and their development, and more likely to help linguists address some practical problems faced by Creole speakers.This project has been supported by, inter alia, a much-appreciated fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (# FA-37500-02). While I am responsible for the views and errors in this paper, I feel immensely privileged to have benefited from the generous encouragement and judicious comments of editor Jane Hill and two anonymous reviewers at Language in Society, and of many friends and colleagues: Myriam Augustin, Marie-Lucie Brutus, Noam Chomsky, Yves Dejean (Papa Iv), Dominique Fattier, Marilyn Goodrich, Ken Hale, Dimitri Hilton, Tometro Hopkins, Tami Kaplan, Antonia MacDonald-Smythe, Heliana Mello, Miriam Meyerhoff, Salikoko Mufwene, Marilene Phipps, Ella Maria Ray, Faith Smith, Geneva Smitherman, Arthur Spears, and Adrienne Talamas.

This study focuses on the everyday use of spatial frames of reference (FoR) and seeks to elucidate the underlying principles for guiding viewers from a signboard to a destination. Using Levinson's tripartite typology of FoR – absolute, relative, and intrinsic – and a VARBRUL analysis, it is shown that each FoR is differentially preferred depending on distinct geographic features of the route and the environment. Specifically, as geographic scale and route complexity increase, there emerges a general tendency away from intrinsic descriptions, through relative descriptions, to absolute descriptions, despite the general low usage of the absolute FoR in modern Japanese. It is argued that the asymmetries in the shift and maintenance of FoRs could be largely, if not wholly, accounted for by using such strategies as “single-perspective” and “absolute-reliance” and properties of “untranslatability.”I wish to thank Shoji Takano, Akiko Kato, and Hiroki Yoshioka for their invaluable comments on the earlier versions of the paper and their technical support on the VARBRUL analyses. My gratitude extends to Jane Hill and the two anonymous reviewers for giving me supportive comments and new insights, and to Hisashi Miura for his extensive assistance in the data collection and coding process. I also greatly benefited from interviews with senior employees at Sankoo Advertising Co., Cutting Kei, and Toyota Kookoku, and from various comments and inquiries from participants in the 11th Meeting of the Japanese Association of Sociolinguistic Sciences, the 37th SIG-SLUD Meeting of the Japanese Society of Artificial Intelligence, and the 28th Open Symposium: “Language” at Aichi University. The research for this article was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) (No. 12610566), 2000–2003 (Japanese Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, and Culture). All misconceptions and errors are of course my own.

Janet Holmes & Miriam Meyerhoff (eds.), The handbook of language and gender. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Pp. 776. Pb $44.95.

This extensive collection of articles is testimony to the continuing topicality and diversity of research in language and gender, spanning a wide range of disciplines, theoretical stances, and methodological approaches and examining gender in a vast variety of linguistic, sociocultural and group-specific contexts. Contributors draw on their backgrounds in linguistics, discourse analysis, anthropology, psychology, education, and even information science and thus reflect the interdisciplinary nature and appeal of current language and gender debates. The Handbook is unique in its endeavor to represent a wide range of languages and thus contains some in-depth analyses of and a large number of references to languages other than English, including Greek, French, German, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Dutch, Gullah Creole, Guyanese Creole, Bislama, Tongan, Tagalog, Malagasy, Lakhota, Japanese, Chinese, Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi, Afrikaans, and Gaelic. This heterogeneity is reinforced by contributions that aim to go beyond a focus on adult, white, heterosexual, middle-class speakers, examining South African gay personal advertisements, the construction of Tongan transgendered identities, or the discursive practices of bilingual Central/Mexican American working-class elementary-school girls and of white Anglo adolescent high-school students from varying social backgrounds. Although the majority of chapters focus on spoken interaction in everyday and in institutional settings, the Handbook also examines grammatical gender and both the construction and the representation of gender in literary and newspaper texts as well as in online communication.

Philip Herbst, Talking terrorism: A dictionary of the loaded language of political violence. Westport, CT & London: Greenwood, 2003. Pp. xvii, 220. Hb $49.95.

Talking terrorism (TT) is not the kind of book typically reviewed in this journal. It is not explicitly about the analysis of language; rather, it is an illustration of the way language can persuade, manipulate, and corrupt. Nor is it written in the expository form expected of scholarly discourse, but instead emulates the form (if not the function) of a dictionary: an alphabetized series of entries, many followed by cross-references.

Dedaić, Mirjana N. & Daniel N. Nelson (eds.), At war with words. New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003. Pp. 479, Hb. $94.00.

Silberstein, Sandra, War of words: Language, politics and 9/11. New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp. 224, Hb. $69.95, pb. $16.95.

Daniel Nelson writes that “we talk our way into war and talk our way out of it” (Dedaić & Nelson [henceforth DN], p. 449). Drawing on a diverse array of methodological and theoretical perspectives and an equally wide range of subject matters, Mirjana Dedaić and Daniel Nelson's edited volume on the role of language in war, and the effects of war on language, is a sprawling, perhaps unwieldy collection that opens up a number of important avenues of investigation in this gravely important but as yet undefined field of study. Sandra Silberstein focuses her book much more narrowly on the language of politics and news media in the wake of the September 11 tragedy. Despite their differences, both books address similar themes: (i) declaring war, or the language used by political leaders to justify military action; (ii) propaganda, or the construction of a war narrative by the media, and the use of political discourse to divide populations; (iii) language politics, or how wars shape language policy; and (iv) controlling speech, or the language used to grant or deny legitimacy in political debates. With the exception of language politics, not touched on by Silberstein, these themes are addressed equally by both books.

Jean Aitchison & Diana M. Lewis (eds.), New media language. London & New York: Routledge, 2003. Pp. x, 209. Pb $25.95.

In recent decades, say Jean Aitchison and Diana M. Lewis in their introduction to this volume, the media have seen an unprecedented amount of change. New media modes have appeared; newspapers and radio have been joined by television and the Internet. The speed of transmission has increased, and many more readers/viewers participate both actively and passively in the ongoing process that is the dissemination and consumption of news.

Yet while a flood of publications has attempted to analyze the changing nature of the media – exploring underlying aims and attitudes, or examining ways in which the media might be misleading its readers/viewers – relatively few, Aitchison & Lewis say, have investigated the language of the media in any depth.

Jacques Maurais and Michael A. Morris (eds.), Languages in a globalising world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv, 345. Hb. $75.00.

This is an ambitious volume keyed to some of the most acute concerns of our time in regard to the linguistic condition of the world of late modernity. This collective effort is structured in such a manner as to offer the widest possible coverage of languages, broad geographical areas, and politico-economic blocks. It consists of 21 chapters, including the Introduction and Conclusion. Figures and tables provide useful supplements to the analytical parts of several chapters. It is unfortunate that the bulk and density of this work does not allow for a chapter-by-chapter review here.

Peter Ladefoged, Phonetic data analysis: An introduction to fieldwork and instrumental techniques. Malden, MA, & Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Pp. xi, 196. Pb. $34.95.

This book teaches readers how to conduct phonetic fieldwork, from planning through data collection to analysis. Peter Ladefoged is eminently qualified to write this book, as probably the world's top phonetician, and as someone with an astounding quantity of phonetic fieldwork experience.

Marcel Danesi, My son is an alien: A cultural portrait of today's youth. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Pp. 240, Pb $22.95.

Marcel Danesi's My son is an alien is a concise, informative guide for parents and teachers seeking to understand adolescent behavior. In what is largely a descriptive account of the teenage experience, the author touches on a range of topics from adolescent sex to gang involvement and drug abuse. Danesi and his research assistants interviewed 200 young people in nine North American cities between 1999 and 2002 to explore their attitudes toward sex, music, drugs, school, and a range of other subjects. The participants ranged in age from 12 to their early 20s and were evenly divided along gender lines and among early, middle, and late teens.

Patricia Mayes, Language, social structure, and culture: A genre analysis of cooking classes in Japan and America. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. xiv, 228. Hb. $102.00.

In 1979, I attended a Sunday afternoon cooking class in Osaka with a small group of Japanese friends and coworkers. There were fewer than 10 people present in the kitchen showroom to learn how to make chanko nabe, a hearty one-pot stew. I do not remember the recipe, or much else about the occasion, except that we traded casual jokes and asides with the instructor, some of them playing off the fact that the dish is well known as standard fare used to bulk up sumo wrestlers. It is astonishing yet gratifying that scholarship on language and culture has advanced to the point that there is now a book entitled Language, social structure and culture: A genre analysis of cooking classes in Japan and America. The reader looking for insights into Japanese or American culture, social structure, or cooking classes as cultural events, may be frustrated or disappointed with this book, but for scholars interested in reading a forthright essay about genre theory, supported with transcripts and exhaustive counting of clause types, it will offer useful and stimulating reading.

Publications received.