This article examines a genre of literary texts in early modern Spain written to be readable in both Latin and Spanish. These texts provide explicit evidence of a phenomenon called “strategic bivalency.” They exemplify both the ideological erasure of language boundaries by experts and the purposeful mobilization of bivalent elements that belong simultaneously to two languages in contact. It is argued that by using such bivalency strategically, speakers and writers in contact zones create the effect of using two languages at once, and that this can be a political act. The texts examined here were composed to demonstrate the superiority of the Spanish language and thus to support Spanish political preeminence. The article addresses the import of the Latin-Spanish bivalent genre for language ideology and considers its implications for understanding of modern bivalent practices and of languages as discrete systems.An earlier version of this article was presented in March 2005 at the International Symposium on Bilingualism 5, in Barcelona. Woolard is grateful to the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia of Spain and to Joan Argenter, principal investigator, for partial support (grant #BFF2003-02954) of that presentation, as part of a project on “Codeswitching and culture in historical communities: Studies in historical linguistic ethnography.” Some of this material was also presented at the Joint XX Conference on Spanish in the U.S. and V Conference on Spanish in Contact with Other Languages, in Chicago, March 2005. Woolard thanks the organizers of these events for the opportunity to discuss these ideas. Archival and library research was supported in part by the New Del Amo Foundation through the University of California and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, which we gratefully acknowledge. Vincent Barletta and Monica Seefeldt assisted with bibliographic work. We are especially indebted to Roger Wright for helpful comments and sources. Thanks also to José del Valle, Narcís Figueras, Ricardo Otheguy, Barbara Johnstone, two anonymous reviewers, and a number of other scholars who kindly responded to queries. We are responsible for any errors and misconceptions that persist despite all this generous assistance.

This article examines how portrayals of Javanese and Indonesian in language policy, the media, and educational settings might lead to enregisterment. This process of association of context to language over time and across space represents knowledge that Indonesians can appropriate in talk. A multidisciplinary approach is used to examine audio and video recordings of Javanese-Indonesian bilingual talk conducted in meetings held in a government office in Central Java, Indonesia. Although the findings are contrary in some ways to earlier descriptions of Javanese and Indonesian usage – for example, in talk containing code alternation there is no one-to-one relationship between hierarchical social relations and code – nevertheless such contradictions can be accounted for by viewing the enregisterment process as merely providing “constituting possibilities” to speakers in situated interaction.I would like to thank the Faculty of Letters, Diponegoro University and the Indonesian Institute of Sciences for help in gaining permission to conduct research in Indonesia. I would also like to thank the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, La Trobe University (LTU), and the Wodonga campus of LTU for the sabbatical leave to conduct this research and for three grants that supported fieldwork in Indonesia. Most important, I would also like to thank the participants in this research, who cannot be named here. Finally, I would like to thank Cecep Wihandi and Junaeni Goebel for their help with initial transcriptions, and Paul Black, Pauline Savy, Peter Burns, two anonymous reviewers, and Barbara Johnstone for their valuable feedback on this work, although all errors remain mine.

This article illustrates the use of an empirical method for examining the perceptual identification of gayness in male speakers. It demonstrates how, by digitally manipulating the speech of isolated individuals, it is possible to obtain reliable evidence that pitch range and sibilant duration may act as indexical of a gay male identity. Further scrutiny of this result, however, illustrates that linguistic indexicality is not as straightforward as it originally appears. Subsequent analyses of the data highlight the ways in which the perceptual evaluation of sexuality is a highly contingent process, dependent upon a variety of sociolinguistic factors. An envelope of variation in listeners' affective judgments of a speaker is shown to exist, and it is argued that research on the perception of identity must go beyond identification of salient features, and also consider when and why these features are not salient.I greatly benefited from the insight and assistance of the following people, whom I would like to thank: Renée Blake, Lisa Davidson, Penny Eckert, Rudi Gaudio, Ron Butters, Keith Walters, Barbara Johnstone, and three anonymous reviewers. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting in Oakland, California, in January 2005, and the 72nd Southeastern Conference on Linguistics (SECOL) in Raleigh, North Carolina in April 2005. I thank the participants at those events for their questions and comments. All errors are, of course, my own.

This article argues for an account of language shift that focuses on ideological conflicts and competing discourses of language, identity, and progress in Tlaxcala, Mexico. The study is based on ethnographic research on patterns of language use, ideology, and boundary differentiation in several Mexicano (Nahuatl)-speaking communities in the Malintzi region of Central Mexico. Metadiscursive practices consisting of three discourses that have local, regional, and national expressions are analyzed: the pro-development metadiscourse of salir adelante, ‘forging ahead’ and improving one's socioeconomic position; the discourse of menosprecio, denigration of indigenous identity; and the pro-indígena or pro-indigenous discourse that promotes a positive attitude toward indigenous identity. Analysis of these discourses offers an understanding of the semiotic resources speakers employ as they orient toward and against particular identities that are both “traditional” and “modern,” as they respond to changing social and economic circumstances. It is concluded that a focus on individuals and communities, through ethnography and discourse analysis, is of critical importance to understanding how and why speakers shift their ideologies and their languages.

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.

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.

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.

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).

Raymond Hickey (ed.), Legacies of Colonial English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp xx, 713. Hb. £90.

This copious volume deals with the development of English at various overseas locations (the “New World,” the Southern Hemisphere, and Asia) during the heyday of British colonialism between the early 17th and late 19th centuries. The 21 studies in the volume demonstrate the legacies of both standard and nonstandard varieties of English from this period. At the same time they show how 17th to 19th century linguistic forms remain influential in characterizing “transported” Englishes to the present day. Not that the volume attempts to straitjacket its contributors: As Hickey emphasizes in the Foreword (p. xix), there are as many scenarios as there are locations in the study of transported Englishes, with each variety arising from different degrees of exposure to different English dialects, and differential influences from indigenous languages and cultures. The main area to which this book belongs is therefore historical dialectology, though it is certainly of relevance to language contact and general sociolinguistics, as well as the specific sociolinguistics of migration.

Greg Myers. Matters of opinion: Talking about public issues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2004. Pp xvii, 258.

Public opinion clearly matters very much to a great many people. We are constantly being given figures from the results of the latest survey and the most recent opinion poll; the losses and gains in popularity of our political leaders make headline news. Our opinions are solicited on the doorstep, on the phone, in the street; pollsters, market researchers, government departments – “they” – want to know what we think. But the mass of data collected is quantitatively processed. It is compiled as statistics, presented in percentages, reported as numerical values. In this book, through his analysis of focus group discussions and mediated opinion giving, Greg Myers takes a very different approach to what counts as an opinion on an issue. Using the findings and methods of interactional sociolinguistics and Conversation Analysis, he investigates the production of opinion as a locally emerging, interactive and above all, contextualized phenomenon.

Geoffrey Sampson, The “language instinct” debate. Revised edition. London and New York: Continuum, 2005. Pp. xiii, 224. Pb $30.00.

First published in 1997 under the title Educating Eve but now revised and expanded and with a useful foreword from Paul Postal, this book presents and critiques all the main arguments that have been offered in support of the thesis that a body of language-specific knowledge is innate in the human child. Sampson finds the thesis unproven on detailed grounds of logic or evidence, and proceeds to sketch an alternative basis for first-language development, rooted in Popperian science and nurture. As the new title indicates, the book purports specifically to respond to Steven Pinker's The language instinct, but somewhat surprisingly Pinker's book isn't extensively debated here: It seems that the publishing demigod is mostly objected to for having renewed the intellectual standing of the nativist stance in the 1990s, and matters are certainly further confused by Sampson's frank admiration for Pinker's more recent The blank slate.

Thomas Ricento (ed.), An Introduction to language policy: Theory and method. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. Pp. xii, 371. Pb $34.95, Hb $69.95.

Excellent textbooks are hard to find, and with An Introduction to language policy: Theory and method, Thomas Ricento delivers one for language policy and planning (LPP). Ricento has assembled an extraordinary collection of carefully crafted introductory essays on core issues in LPP. Each contribution is written by the leading researcher(s) in a given area. In all, the book includes 19 chapters divided into three sections, each with an overview by Ricento: “Theoretical perspectives in language policy,” “Methodological perspectives in language policy,” and “Topical areas in language policy.”

Boyd Davis, Alzheimer talk, text and context: Enhancing communication. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

I picked up Boyd Davis's edited volume with some anxiety. I had let go of my Alzheimer's research for a number of painful reasons in graduate school and had, over the past 10 years, invented myself in the sociopolitics of language learning and teaching. When I spotted the volume at a book exhibit, I thought: Would I be able to connect to any of the work anymore? A lot of research ground gets covered in a decade; would I be able to pick up any of the conversational threads? When a couple of months later the editor of Language and Society contacted me about possibly reviewing it, I took it as a sign beckoning and inviting me back to that space. Needless to say, I was delighted at the array of readings. The volume covers a range from personal accounts (by Jeutonne Brewer), to issues of identity, personhood maintenance, and gender (D. Shenk; E. B. Ryan K. Byrne, H. Spykerman & J. B.Orange; C. Pope & D. N. Ripich), to discourse markers, lexical variation, and bilingualism (Davis, M. Maclagan & P. Mason, Davis & C Bernstein, G. M. J. Nold), to concerns relating to caregiver training (K. Byrne & J. B. Orange; Ryan, Spykerman & A. P. Anas; N. Green; and L. Russell-Pinson & L. Moore) and metaphors by which language and Alzheimer's research can be described (H. E. Hamilton). Each of these areas laminates Alzheimer's talk with feeling and care, thus countering the sedimented psycholinguistic tropes that have typically written about Alzheimer discourse in clinical and cold ways.

Kees de Bot and Sinfree Makoni, Language and aging in multilingual contexts. (Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 53.) Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2005. Pp.vi., 162. Hb. $99.95.

This book raises many questions. Depending on one's disciplinary perspective, this slim volume could be seen as uneven in its coverage and, as one reviewer has commented, its intended audience is not always clear (Chen 2006). Notwithstanding, it is an important book, on two levels. Its ostensible purpose is to present a contextualizing summary of language and aging, designed to tug readers away from a monolingual, Eurocentric focus. Beneath and through its chapters runs its second stream of thought, an effort to push readers to understand that many older people, and especially those speaking more than one language, are aging out-of-place, dis-placed, cut off by new caretaking venues and other-languaged caregivers, from their own places, those sites once indexed by their language (Lamb 2000, Neilson 2003). As Arjun Appadurai comments in an interview, “Sites, in the sense of secure locations for the practices of everyday life, may have largely vanished” (Baldauf & Hoeller 1999). What we have previously assumed about adult language, and about language and aging processes, may also need to change.

Mike Baynham and Anna de Fina (eds.), Dislocations/relocations: Narratives of displacement. Manchester, UK & Northampton, MA: St. Jerome, 2005. Pp. 262. Pb. £19.99.

Clearly announced in the title, the topic of this collection of essays is the experience of spatial displacement conveyed through narrative by the individuals who undergo it. The authors approach it as a theoretical and methodological problem in narrative studies, as well as an opportunity for reflecting on a social and political phenomenon – the (forced or freely chosen) movement of people – that has come to be seen as central to the experience of modernity (2). The project is very ambitious. It not only seeks to make a conceptual contribution to the already vast and multidisciplinary literature on narrative, but also hopes to address enough instances of discursive practices that involve migrants and minorities around the world to be able to claim that it sheds light on the general phenomenon of displacement. Overall, the book is stronger when it addresses its second objective, and it offers a multi-layered and comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of dislocation as captured through narrative practices. What contributes to the success of the book are, in addition to the quality of the individual contributions, its rigorous organization in parts that cohere conceptually and thematically, the clear justification of the project offered by the two editors in an excellent introduction, and the concluding remarks by James Collins, which leave the reader with a sense of a consistent intellectual product.

Ousseina Alidou, Engaging modernity: Muslim women and the politics of agency in postcolonial Niger. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Pp. xxi, 235. Hb. $45.00.

Challenging conventional discourse about African Muslim women as passive victims of religious, ethnic, economic, and cultural oppression, Alidou analyzes the lives and discourse of three prominent women of Niger. She focuses on these women's agency, understood as a capacity to realize one's aspirations in spite of obstacles. More broadly, she discusses the meaning of modernity for Muslim women in Niger today. Alidou is self-reflexive as she incorporates her own voice in the study – the voice of a Muslim female linguist and cultural critic from Niger who now resides and teaches in the United States. The book's qualitative data comprise Niger-based participant observations, interviews, and literary texts (poems, songs, fairytale). A chapter on Niger's political economy of education is supplemented with quantitative sociological data on educational achievement.

Coulter H. George, Expressions of agency in ancient Greek. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. x, 288. Hb. $85.

Expressions of agency in ancient Greek is a meticulous study of the development of passive-with-agent constructions (PACs) in ancient Greek, covering the timespan from Preclassical Greek to the 12th century ce. The author focuses on the complex history of the various, primarily prepositional, agent markers of passive voice verbs in various moods and tenses, such as participles or perfect verbs. He defines a passive verb as a detransitivized verb that retains the idea of agency whether or not it is expressed. The agent is to be defined as an oblique nominal occurring with a passive verb that would be the subject if the sentence were rewritten in the active voice.

Christopher J. Hall, An introduction to language and linguistics: Breaking the language spell. London/New York: Continuum, 2005. Pp. xvii, 344. Pb. $24.95.

Part 1, “Magic,” introduces language and linguistics. The “Language Spell” is Hall's metaphor for human beings' misperception of the nature of language as primarily social. The insights of (generative) linguistics hold the key to breaking the Spell, by revealing the “essential biological reality” of the “language faculty” (xii). The book opens with a discussion of language and thought (“mentalese”), where terms like “mystery” (10), “miracle” (11), “cognitive magic” (14), and the assignment of increasingly volitional features to the Spell (e.g., 26) set the tone.

Martin J. Ball (ed.), Clinical sociolinguistics. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Pp. xx, 335. Pb $39.95.

Clinical sociolinguistics is aimed primarily at speech-language pathologists (SLPs) and similar professionals. Its purpose is to bridge the historical gap between sociolinguistics and clinical speech-language pathology. The book is relevant not only to SLPs, however, but also to sociolinguists interested in the clinical applications of their field and in addressing the gap between the two fields.

Kate Burridge, Weeds in the garden of words: Further observations on the tangled history of the English language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. ix, 196. Pb $19.99.

In this sequel to Blooming English, Kate Burridge continues her metaphor of the English language as garden, this time by examining its “weeds.” As any gardener will tell you, a weed is a plant which dares to grow where it's not wanted; by extension, Burridge's “weeds” are lexical and grammatical forms in English seen as unwanted by prescriptivists. However, just as one gardener's weed is another's beautiful wildflower, words with very positive connotations nowadays were once an insult reserved for the evil (e.g., wizard), and forms such as passives, which so annoy modern style manual writers, are plentiful in many of the greatest works of English literature. Like Burridge's previous volume, Weeds consists primarily of rewritten pieces she created for a radio program and these can be read in any order.