Lisa J. Green, African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 285 pp. Pb $31.99.

When I first saw Cambridge University Press's announcement of Lisa Green's book, I was quite excited, because a systematic, comprehensive introductory book on African American English had been lacking in the field for quite a while. But now one is available and – to start with my overall impression – it is very good. In what follows I survey the book's contents as well as offer critical assessment of its goals and how they are achieved.

Philip Glenn, Laughter in interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xi, 190, Hb $75.00.

Drawing on extant research in conversation analysis (CA) and other fields, Glenn's entry in the “Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics” series is both an excellent introduction to CA for those outside the field and an interesting exploration of the social phenomenon of laughter. The first chapter gives a general survey of the research, which has often focused on the physicality of laughter and its relation to humor. Ultimately, however, the chapter suggests a function of laughter beyond expressing amusement: affiliation with co-participants in social interaction. In chap. 2, Glenn provides a helpful outline of CA. He emphasizes CA's focus on participants' perspectives and provides a cogent explanation for CA's meticulous transcription conventions with the example of silences, marked on CA transcripts in tenths of seconds. To leave them out, he argues, would be to assume from the beginning that silences in talk mean nothing (p. 37) – an idea that most competent talkers, let alone CA researchers, would reject out of hand.

This study explores the emergence and developments through time of a semiotic artefact, the shield, used by demonstrators in violent anti-government protests in contemporary Venezuela. Drawing on the concept of discourse itineraries (Scollon 2008), the material and semiotic transformations this artefact underwent are mapped through various protest cycles, whilst considering the semiotic enrichment of century-long traditions of shields that inform the various functions they play within current day itineraries. The study concludes by discussing the advantages of using the concept of discourse itineraries for understanding moments in the life cycle of semiotic artefacts in the linguistic landscape and outlines future opportunities to expand the analysis of shields beyond the Venezuelan case. (Linguistic landscape of protest, discourse itineraries, semiotic artefact, shields, Venezuela)*

This study aims to develop an understanding of how different communicative strategies used by case officers in asylum interviews may position applicants in various ways. The analysis focuses on a relatively standardised sequence at the start of asylum interviews, where the communicative situation and its legal framework are explained to the applicant. Case officers use guidelines to support them with this process. Using a comparative discourse analysis of excerpts from two asylum interviews, I examine the discursive means by which the applicants are positioned in the case officers’ utterances, drawing mainly on the concepts of positioning and recontextualisation. The findings show how case officers’ instructive statements could be used as a resource not only to provide information to the applicants but also to position asylum seekers in a respectful way. (Asylum interview, intertextuality, positioning, recontextualisation, speaker role)*

On 7 January 2021, Jan Blommaert died aged 59, after a ten-month battle with cancer. He was an extraordinary person and a brilliant academic, and there have been a great many very moving personal accounts of how much Jan meant to the people he interacted with. I knew and worked with him for over twenty-five years, and during his protracted illness, for me and for a lot of others, it was good to be able to tell him directly how much I owed him. But beyond the warm, hospitable, humorous and hugely energising individual we knew, Jan was profoundly committed to—indeed lived—a programme of sociolinguistics that he often traced to the writings of Dell Hymes, the founder of Language in Society. A number of this programme's core elements were spelled out in the introduction to Hymes’ ground-breaking 1969 collection, Reinventing Anthropology, a ‘book… for people for whom “the way things are” is not reason enough for the ways things are, who find fundamental questions pertinent and in need of personal answer’ (1969:7). For my account of the value and vitality that Jan brought to sociolinguistics, I have borrowed from the title of Hymes’ introduction, ‘The use of anthropology: Critical, political, personal’ and, as well as citing some of Jan's own words, I also draw on the reflections of others as evidence of the vigour, clarity, and coherence with which he articulated a practice and purpose for work on language in society.

In this article, the collective language shift from Swedish to Ukrainian in the traditionally Swedish-speaking community of Gammalsvenskby is studied particularly through interview data from sixteen first-generation nonspeakers of the heritage language. The article argues that it is not enough to study collective language shift merely from the point of view of the last-speaker generation, but that the nonspeaker generation's views are also needed to understand and describe language shift, since they are also participants in language shift. Two themes, seemingly central in language shift research, are explored: agency in language nontransmission, and external pressure on heritage-language speakers to conform linguistically. The conclusion of the study is that most of the interviewed nonspeakers see the language shift mainly as a pragmatic development, although some also quote external pressure as a factor. (Language shift, Gammalsvenskby, nonspeaker)*

Research on Jewish English in the United States has drawn on a set of ideologies linking the Jewish ethnolinguistic repertoire to New York City English, but less is known about how these ideologies interface with the social meanings of regional features in the communities outside New York in which these speakers live. Through meta-linguistic commentary and acoustic analyses drawn from sociolinguistic interviews with white Jewish and Catholic Chicagoans, we find that meta-linguistic ideologies associate Jewish speakers with New York City English and white Catholic speakers with ‘local’ Chicago features. However, in actual production, these linguistic differences appear to be driven by neighborhood rather than ethnoreligious identity alone. We argue that while meta-linguistic commentary may re-circulate broader linguistic ideologies, the uptake of elements of the ethnolinguistic repertoire may depend on the social meanings of those features in the local community more broadly, including class- and place-linked variation. (Ethnolinguistic repertoire, place, Northern Cities Shift, Jewish English)*

Before accepting claims of the function of linguistic stylization, it is imperative that we are certain of what we are examining. Mikhail Bakhtin's widely cited definition that stylization is an “artistic representation of another's linguistic style” (1986:362) leaves unclear what counts as “artistic,” making identifying stylizations simultaneously intuitively obvious and empirically illusive. Drawing from 270 hours of data from a radio program, the current study uses interactional discourse and acoustic analyses to compare one disc jockey's exaggerations of ethnically salient accents (stylizations) with his mundane use of reported speech. The analyses demonstrate that in both types of talk he uses a similar bundle of interactional and acoustic resources to design his talk as belonging to someone else. The link between reported and stylized speech places stylizations in an analytical category distinct from that of crossing and its issues of language ownership. The pertinent questions are those of speaker responsibility. (Crossing, stylization, reported speech, discourse analysis, acoustic analysis)*

The international march of English is one of the leading sociolinguistic phenomena of our times. There have been internationally dominant languages before – religious languages like Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, as well as Sanskrit and Koranic Arabic – and politico-cultural languages, often linked to the religious cultures with which they propagate: Greek and Latin again, French, and (in the 20th century until the fall of Communism) Russian. In the last years of the 20th century English has established an unprecedentedly powerful position, which has even grown stronger since the more circumspect evaluation of its position by McCrum et al. 1986. The extent of its quantitative and qualitative domination of international geopolitics, science, commerce, communications, technology, politics, and consumer culture is evident in journals like English Today, World Englishes, and English World-Wide. What Crystal aims to do in this book is to capture the big picture, in focus and in perspective, and to assess where English really stands as we enter the 21st century.