Interest in Hugo Schuchardt (1842–1927) has recently grown and broadened. A number of recent studies and collections of his work are reviewed. The conventional historiographical portrait of him shows an isolated, marginal dilettante intransigently opposed to the neogrammarian hypothesis of regular sound change. A closer look shows a large body of important work oriented around themes of language mixture, lexicalism, and the importance of the social matrix of language. His sustained work on these topics as they weave in and out of a selected group of language families, his claims to first or early priority in the wave theory, the continuum hypothesis, the creole origin of Black English, a variety of ethnoscience research, and other aspects of sociolinguistics make him a commanding figure in the history of modern linguistics. A reappraisal is called for; resources for it are noted.

Analysis of the vowel/consonant patterns in a world sample of folk songs indicates that some speech sounds vary regularly with certain aspects of social structure. Consonant frequencies shift in relation to technological level: mid stops, fricatives and laterals increase in relative frequency along a scale of productive range. Alteration in the vowel map, on the other hand, seems to be related to cross-cultural differences in sex role. Thus changes in phonology, familiar to the linguist, may be symbolic of and explained by familiar societal phenomena. These suppositions are, it is true, based on the analysis of sung languages and remain to be confirmed for speech. However, the power of expressive style as a general diagnostic of the layout of culture implies that they will be so confirmed, since expressive patterns often turn out to be a sort of heightened and extra-redundant version of everyday behavior. Moreover, collections of recorded song performances provide a world-wide resource of ‘unselfconscious’ and culturally validated language data that is simply unavailable for other kinds of speech activity. (Phonology; variation; expressive (stylistic) function; song style; mode of production and se role; cross-cultural sample.)

Bloom (1981, 1984) linked the existence of specific grammatical constructions – for example, the counterfactual conditional in English – to the development of a labeled cognitive schema specific to counterfactual thought. He claimed that because the Chinese language lacks an equivalent grammatical marker, Chinese speakers do not develop the corresponding cognitive schema and thus process counterfactuals “less naturally” (1981:22) than English speakers. Whereas attempts to replicate Bloom (Au 1983, 1984; Liu 1985) questioned the extent to which such differences exist, this article demonstrates that where differences in counterfactual response patterns clearly do exist, they cannot be attributed to the presence/absence of a linguistic “counterfactual” construction.

Stephen C. Levinson, Space in language and cognition: Explorations in cognitive diversity. Series in Language, Culture and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xxiii, 389. Pb $27.99.

This is an important book that makes basic arguments of real consequence for current understanding of the relation among language, gesture, and mind. Convincing new experimental and field data from a wide range of languages are used to argue that human spatial cognition is organized into a limited set of types, that cross-linguistic variation in spatial categorization is far more extensive than previously known, and that language structure has a profound, if mediated, influence on thought, gesture, and other modalities of nonlinguistic cognition. Levinson carefully separates linguistic from cognitive analyses in order to trace the relations between them. His book is also an exercise in comparative linguistics, and a strong proposal for a typology of linguistic systems of spatial representation. The scope and strength of the arguments ensure the significance of the book and the debates it has already begun to provoke (see Gallistel 2002, Levinson et al. 2002, Li & Gleitman 2002, Majid 2002).

Arguments about the sociopolitical significance of the informalisation of English have been central to the critical study of language in society since the 1980s. This article demonstrates that informalisation was also a key concern of ordinary users of British English in the 1980s. Correspondents in the British Mass Observation Project articulated judgements of informalisation that were in many ways continuous with those of academic linguists. The article argues that such critical arguments about language were part of a ‘structure of feeling’ (Raymond Williams) of late twentieth-century Britain. This suggests a rethinking of ordinary language users’ relations to their linguistic experience, not as unthinkingly ‘prescriptivist’, nor as merely ‘commonsensical’, but as exhibiting a nuance which academic linguists would do well to engage with more fully. The article makes the case for the use of social-historical archives in investigations of metalanguage, as a means by which the social significance of language can be better understood. (Critical linguistics, folk linguistics, terms of address, informalisation, synthetic personalisation, prescriptivism)

Labovian sociolinguistics constitutes an important paradigm that brings to the forefront issues of social justice in linguistics and asks about the debt the scholar has towards the community once s/he gets information from it. Nevertheless, as many scholars have discussed, and even though this paradigm has focused on changing society for the better, it has serious limitations on how it conceptualizes the relationship between language and society. Based on critical race theory and language ideologies, Lewis powerfully contributes to this discussion by critiquing the principle of error correction (PEC) proposed by Labov as a particular way of conceptualizing social change. As Lewis points out at the end of the article, this principle reflects an ‘earlier era’ and needs to be reconsidered in light of the significant transformations not only in the study of language in society developed in recent decades but also in critical theory and humanities in general.

This article presents a conversation-analytic account of the various usages of the Kiswahili particle ah as it is routinely employed in naturally occurring Kiswahili conversation. Adopting a strategy reminiscent of the one Heritage and others adopted for English oh, it is argued that the seemingly disparate uses of this “language-specific object” represent various context-specific particularizations of a single semantic core. The basic claim is that ah constitutes a response cry that indexes to the other interlocutors the speaker's negative evaluative stance toward a particular issue. In this capacity, it frequently occupies the turn-initial position of a second pair part. Depending on the specifics of the sequential environment, the “object” of the indexed stance is traceable to either the particular item that is being talked about or the action performed in the preceding first. In the former case, the particle is used to demonstrate the speaker's affiliation with the previous speaker. In the latter case, it is used to demonstrate his disaffiliation with the previous speaker. (Kiswahili, particle, stance, second pair parts, turn-initial position, conversation analysis, comparative perspective)*

The question is a fair one. The concept of teacher resistance is now common lore among sociolinguists, who have heard about or who have experienced the rejection of well-intended efforts to bring linguistic knowledge to classrooms and schools. When we explain that we have had hardly any ‘resistant’ teachers—only two we can recall, over the course of working with thousands of teachers for the past decade—we are generally met with incredulity, quickly followed by a request to learn how we've made it work.

Many personal names in Temne (a Mel language spoken in Sierra Leone) are borrowed from other languages, and some contain foreign sounds and sequences which are unpronounceable for Temne speakers when they appear in other words. Contrary to what would be expected within a model of borrowing in which foreign sounds and sequences are modified over time to conform with the borrowers' language, the foreign sounds and sequences which occur in Temne names are stable. This paper treats these exceptions to the Temne phonological System as instances of phonological stereotyping – cases in which sounds and sequences, although they may be exceptions to the core phonology of a language, have acquired expressive meaning. (Linguistic borrowing, phonology, personal names, Sierra Leone)

This article analyzes how English medium of instruction (EMI) policy is implemented by disciplining teachers’ and students’ language behaviors in school spaces. I adopt Foucault's (1977) ‘discipline’ to examine how schools exercise disciplinary power to create an English-only environment in multilingual classroom contexts. The data is drawn from an ethnographic study of EMI policies in two Nepali schools. The findings of the study show that schools exercise their disciplinary power through both panoptic and post-panoptic surveillance strategies to police their students’ and teachers’ language practices and punish them for speaking the languages other than English. Such disciplinary power is reinforced by neoliberal development ideology that legitimizes linguistic and symbolic capitals of English. While enforcing EMI policies, schools craft students’ identity as disciplined English-speaking subjects who are perceived to contribute to development ideology. The article discusses some major impacts that sociolinguists can make on transforming unequal EMI language policies and practices. (Discipline, English medium of instruction (EMI), language policing)*

Ho Wah Kam & Ruth Y. L. Wong (eds.), English language teaching in East Asia today: Changing policies and practices. 2nd ed. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2004. Pp. 474. Hb $30.00.

Ho Wah Kam & Ruth Y. L. Wong (eds.), Language policies and language education: The impact in East Asian countries in the next decade. 2nd ed. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2004. Pp. 384. Hb $30.00.

These two volumes, edited by two distinguished scholars in language education from Singapore, provide basic, essential, up-to-date information about the language situations and development of English language teaching in East Asian countries. Together they form a valuable encyclopedic reference work that will give scholars, teachers, and language policy makers a bigger picture of the Asian region through which they can better understand the position of their own countries and learn from the experience of others. Although the two volumes can be read independently, it is more logical to sequence Language policies and language education before English language teaching in East Asia today because the former provides an overview of language policies and language education in the region from a macro perspective, which helps to set out the necessary contextual background for a micro exploration into issues of English language teaching in the second volume. The editors take pride in the fact that the two books provide an “insiders' perspective,” meaning that all the country-based chapters were written by scholars who have lived in the given country for a long time. Indeed, this helps to establish high credibility for the information provided. On the good foundation that these two volumes have laid, comparative studies across countries in the region can be conducted more easily and efficiently.