To understand this book, a little background information helps. I first encountered Ali Mazrui in 1968–70 when I was the first lecturer in linguistics at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda; Mazrui, a member of the political science faculty, was already a famous orator, acknowledged by all as possessing “a golden tongue.” Since then, he has gone on to become probably the most famous African studies professor in the United States; he was the presenter of the nine-part BBC/PBS television series The Africans: A triple heritage, and he is the author of many books and articles on Africa. He has taught at many universities around the world, and is now director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies and Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at the State University of New York at Binghamton. His junior co-author (a relative?), Alamin M. Mazrui, was trained as a linguist and is an associate professor of Black studies at Ohio State University. Both are native speakers of Swahili from Mombasa, Kenya (they prefer to refer to the language as Kiswahili, with its noun class prefix, as it would be if one were speaking the language itself). Kiswahili, of course, is probably the best-known African language; many people in East Africa and other areas (e.g. the Democratic Republic of Congo) speak it as a second language. Furthermore, it is one of the few indigenous languages with official status in an African nation; it is the official language of Tanzania, and the co-official language in Kenya along with English. However, Kiswahili is spoken natively mainly along the East African coastline and on the offshore islands (e.g. Zanzibar), often by persons with a dual Arabic-African heritage similar to that of the Mazruis.

This article analyzes the use of metapragmatic description in the ethnoclassification of language by native speakers on the Franco-Antillean island of Saint Barthélemy. A prevalent technique for metapragmatic description is facilitated by the differential formation of honorific registers in the island's indigenous languages, so that speakers essentialize honorific pronouns as tropes of whole languages and classify the languages in such terms. This process reflects the varied geolinguistic and generational attributes of these speakers, whose register or social-dialectal calculations are all based ultimately on folk ideologies of honorification. (Classification, language ideology, French Creole, metapragmatics, Caribbean sociolinguistics)

This article links the use of you know in a group of mostly working-class London adolescents (WCG) and I know in a mostly middle-class group (MCG) to Foucault's notion of power/knowledge and, by extension, to group-specific (re)production of dominant discourses and power relations. Speakers in WCG use you know clause-finally to mark the information in that clause, which tends to be about the deviance of others, as dominant. Speakers in MCG use I know either clause-initially or as a stand-alone item in reaction to the previous speaker's utterance and to mark that utterance as dominant. Thus, the use of you know shows relatively active identity construction while the use of I know shows relatively reactive identity construction, but both groups construct their identities indirectly: WCG because they talk about others, and MCG because they react to others. Relations between these processes and class and gender identities are discussed.

This article demonstrates the potential for phonological variables to be a resource for the expression of ideology and identity in historical circumstances such as those experienced recently in the Catalonian procés. Based on a corpus consisting of communicative events from sixteen leading Catalan politicians, four Spanish linguistic variants are analyzed. Apart from a handful of structural predictors, the mixed-effects logistic regression analysis shows the robustness of (only) two extralinguistic factor groups: the social origin and the identification of the politicians as Catalan nationalist (mainly pro-independence) or not nationalist. As regards the latter, the most significant of all predictors, the analysis shows how nationalist politicians always favor the sounds mainly associated with vernacular pronunciation in eastern Catalan speech communities ([-ɫ] and [-t]), but at the same time also favor other sounds associated with more canonical and pan-Hispanic prestige variants ([-ð] and [-ð-]). These apparently contradictory results can be explained if the social meaning of all variants is considered around the same indexical field, that of authenticity. In this sense, nationalists seem to ‘appropriate’ the Spanish language by tingeing its expressive habits with uses closer to their language. (Phonological variation, nationalism, ideology, languages in contact, Spanish, Catalan)*

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.

Enfield's The anatomy of meaning is a pathbreaking exploration of multimodal communication based on Lao video recordings and fieldwork. Of special interest is his notion of composites, through which he addresses the question of cross-modal integration—how it is that signs in different modalities cohere, speech and gesture being his focus. For whom, to what degree, and through what means do composites coalesce? Does this notion denote a kind of cross-modal orderliness or the achievement of orderliness—perhaps through heuristics and inference-making? As I detail the book's engagement with this issue and compare it with others—especially recent discussions of “textuality” in linguistic anthropology and older structuralist approaches to behavioral events—I suggest that Enfield's notion is best viewed as a methodological operator. It is a notion that performs a kind of methodological displacement, pushing against an entrenched logocentrism while spurring us to view communicative events as multiplex, cross-modal assemblages. (Multi-modal, cross-modal, gesture, interaction, video, Lao)

The verbal style of middle-class and lower-class ten-year-old children was assessed in a descriptive communication task using three different types of stimulus items: standard visual, tactual, and items embedded in a narrative. In a partial replication of Heider's (1971) work it was found that lower-class children used a global descriptive style to communicate information about standard visual (abstract) stimuli, whereas middle-class children used an analytic style. Group differences also were observed with tactually input stimuli, although the lower-class responses shifted toward an analytic style. However, both middle-class and lower-class children used an analytic style to describe stimulus items when they were embedded in a narrative context. In addition, order effects were observed, suggesting that lower-class children use an analytic style with standard visual stimuli if they perceive this style as situationally appropriate. Social class differences in verbal style are not only a function of type of stimulus item, but are also a function of strategies applied in the communicative situation.