Stylization is the knowing deployment of culturally familiar styles and identities that are marked as deviating from those predictably associated with the current speaking context. Dialect stylization involves performing non-current-first-person personas by phonological and related means, sometimes in play or parody. Although these processes may seem to be very local, it is arguably true that dialects are increasingly experienced in reflexive and mediated environments that breed stylization. One of these is light entertainment on radio; this article analyzes data from English-language national radio broadcasts in Wales. Welshness is self-consciously evoked in the data, partly through dialect performance, where the variables (ou) and (ei) are a rich semiotic resource, linked to nondialectal means of evoking Welsh cultural stances and practices. Although stylization is a form of strategic de-authentication, its ultimate relationship with authenticity is complex. As a facet of cultural performance, stylization can be part of a process of cultural reproduction, and I argue that this is the best interpretation of the present data. As a result, sociolinguistics may need to reconsider its assumptions about cultural authenticity.

From a strict linguistic viewpoint, code-switching intertwines with a diverse range of language contact phenomena, from strict interference to several kinds of language mixture. Code-switching has also been addressed as an interactional phenomenon in everyday talk, an approach that implies a synchronic perspective. In this article, however, data are drawn from the records of communicative practices left behind by Catalan Jewish communities of the 14th and 15th centuries. These communities lived under well-defined cultural, political, and social conditions and displayed a rather complex linguistic repertoire of both linguistic resources and verbal genres. I analyze two of these verbal genres, which themselves must be viewed in the context of a broader Hispano-Arabic cultural tradition; they draw on a heteroglot background in which Semitic and Romance languages merged. In this analysis of the functions that code-switching played in these verbal practices, a contrast emerges between the use of code-switching and lexical borrowing (or alternation vs. insertional types of code-switching) in both verbal genres. This has implications for a much debated issue – the alleged existence of a medieval Catalan Jewish language – and challenges the idea that forms of linguistic practice must always be reduced to a bounded code.

This article provides an overview of the dynamics of answering and resisting or evading questions in broadcast news interviews. After a preliminary examination of the practices through which answers are recognizably constructed, the analysis turns to the practices through which interviewees manage responses that resist the agenda of an interviewer's question. When resisting overtly, interviewees engage in various forms of “damage control.” When resisting covertly, interviewees take steps to render the resistance less conspicuous. Both sets of practices facilitate resistant responses by reducing the negative consequences that might otherwise follow. Such practices demonstrate that, although interviewees have developed practices for resisting questions, the norm of answering remains a salient feature of the contemporary broadcast news interview.

It is argued that a grammaticization perspective affords insights on the problem of functional equivalence in variables “above and beyond phonology.” This is a study of variation between aspectual expressions involving Spanish estar ‘be located’ and andar ‘go around’ + gerund. An analysis of Mexican oral corpora shows both linguistic and social conditioning: Each auxiliary is favored by certain classes of main verbs, and andar is favored in popular varieties. Semantic bleaching along parallel paths results in layering in the domain of progressive aspect, while retention results in synchronic distribution patterns congruent with the original meaning of the source constructions. Thus, once meaningful aspectual differences become distributional routines. At the same time, the patterning of verbs denoting outdoor activities with andar leads to social differences and the association of this variant with rural and popular varieties.

Spoken Soul is a very stimulating book to read, informative and solidly grounded in scholarship from several disciplines, including quantitative sociolinguistics, sociology, socioeconomic history, and African American literature. It exemplifies the contribution that linguistic research on African American English (AAE) can make to African American studies. It is also a model for how scholarly findings can be shared with the lay public in a language that is vivid and accessible. Those who are familiar with AAE will appreciate the fact that this vividness is borrowed from the subject matter itself. Thus, the authors demonstrate implicitly that AAE is not an impoverished vernacular, and even scholarly discourse can benefit from it.

Linguists who teach introductory courses in their discipline routinely encounter the nonlinguists' knowledge, or lack of it, about language. Their students are fairly predictable in their ignorance of basic linguistic concepts: For example, they typically believe that there in one standard dialect of English, that a word's true meaning has little to do with its current usage, and that nonstandard dialects are primitive languages. In fact, teachers of introductory courses in linguistics realize that their principal responsibility is to correct the many and common misperceptions about language that prevail their culture. In most respects, Folk linguistics is a systematic study of these misperceptions.

In The grammar of autobiography, Jean Quigley makes a claim that one often hears nowadays: that the self is constructed in autobiographical narrative discourse. Two dimensions of the work distinguish her analysis of narrative self-construction from many other treatments of the subject. First, she offers a genuinely interdisciplinary account, drawing on functional linguistics, theoretical and developmental psychology, and accounts of language development. Second, she studies a particular category of linguistic forms – modals – as the key to narrative self-construction.

Well known for its creation and adoption of modern Hebrew as its national language, Israel is still one of the most linguistically heterogeneous societies in the world. Bernard Spolsky and Elana Shohamy delve into this complex reality and describe a coherent picture of it, drawing from an updated model of linguistic policy which they elaborate. I found no few weaknesses in the book in regard to the sociological interpretation of sociolinguistic facts, but its major interest resides in the description of Israel's linguistic diversity and evolution. It is one of the very few attempts to date to do that, and it merits attention.

In this excellent study of guided tours through two Israeli kibbutz museums, Tamar Katriel comments that for her, “tracing the construction of Israeli culture is as much an act of recognition as it is one of deconstruction” (p. 116). Katriel, a native Israeli Jew, is telling us that for her, moving through these museums, looking at the exhibits, and listening to the guides is an emotional experience. The recognition of which Katriel writes is, one may say, that moment of connectivity in which one orients oneself to person, space, and time in ways that evoke (perhaps suddenly) an awareness that is related to one's very sense of self. The intersection of person, space, and time creates place and the emotions associated with it. When these moments of intersection occur in museums, the practice of taking objects out of their native contexts and infusing them with the purpose of presence within exhibits is successful. The purpose of guides in these museums is to create this sense of place within the people who visit these sites, to engender recognition within these visitors, even if they know little or nothing of the representations that constitute exhibits. Creating the feeling-tones of place is at the heart of guiding in these museums; and the narration of representations is the primary medium through which recognition is evoked.

This volume is a highly detailed and thoughtful analysis of the language use of Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese speakers in one of the major cities of Australia, Melbourne. Bringing together census findings and other empirical data, this study addresses the issues of pluricentricity and language maintenance and language shift in an immigrant context. Australia, as one of the world's more successful countries in its national bilingual policy, has been a catalyst for local research in community languages. The present volume complements the earlier works of both authors, for instance, Clyne 1991 and Kipp 1981.

As this is my first note to the readers of Language in Society, I begin by expressing my gratitude to the former Editor-in-chief, William Bright, for his many years of splendid stewardship of the journal and for his kind help and patience in the changeover. I also want to thank the distinguished members of the Editorial Board, some of whom have seen unexpected extra years added to their terms while I have been getting organized. But mainly I write to explain the format of the present issue, with its four quite long articles and only six book reviews. This does not represent a change in editorial policy in the direction of a de-emphasis of book reviews or in favor of long papers. It does, however, represent a response to two problems. The first is that, while the time from submission to an editorial decision now averages about 4 months (a reasonable interval, considering that it can sometimes take weeks to find referees for an article), the time from acceptance of an article to publication in Language in Society is now at least a year, and often 18 months. I want to try to decrease that interval. The second is that I recently spent six months in Australia. It was impractical to forward books submitted for review from Tucson to Melbourne, so I commissioned only one or two book reviews between June and December 2000. The shift in balance of the present issue permits me to stretch out the book reviews