The two books under review, Motivation in language planning and language policy (MLPP) and Multilingualism and government (M&G), are both about language policy, at least at one level, and both are, or claim to be, based on case studies. That is the end of any similarity between them.

Many linguists believe that the revitalization of moribund languages, where there may only be a handful of elderly fluent speakers left, is a noble (if not also nearly impossible) ideal for those native communities involved in such work; and this is not to mention the reintroduction of a long-dead language, such as the South Australian language Kaurna (pronounced [ga:na]), spoken on the Adelaide Plains until the last native speaker, Ivaritji (a.k.a. Amelia Taylor), died in 1929. Rob Amery challenges the standards by which language revitalization programs are judged as successful, while giving us a step-by-step method for the reintroduction and revalorization of an extinct native tongue, which he calls the Formulaic Method. This detailed case study of the beginning stages of Kaurna language revival will be of interest not just to linguists involved in the field, but especially to community members and other nonspecialists who are somehow connected with lesser-used languages and language revival efforts. Amery's work is also an important contribution to the emerging field of ecological linguistics and its application to language planning issues.

This book is an outcome of a colloquium, held in 1997, on ideology and language policies with special focus on English. There are nine chapters, with a lucid introduction by Ricento and a bibliography at the end. Ricento also contributes a chapter on the theoretical aspects of language planning and policy. The other chapters touch on language policies in Australia (Helen Moore); colonial language policies (Chaps. 3 and 7, by Alastair Pennycook); language ideologies in the US (Terrence G.Wiley); linguistic imperialism with reference to English (Robert Phillipson); and policies and the role of English in Sri Lanka (Suresh Canagurajah), North India (Selma K. Sonntag), and South Africa (Stanly G. M. Ridge).

This article explores racial ‘privilege’ through the lens of temporalized landscapes. Specifically, I examine chronotopes of class-inflected ‘Chinese’ privilege on advertising hoardings for ‘Jadescape’, a condominium development in multiracial Singapore. Two chronotopic dimensions are discussed. The first, pertaining to representations inscribed on the hoardings, manifest a ‘chronotopic bricolage’, involving the fusion of a ‘traditional racial-cultural chronotope’ of a historicised ‘Chineseness’, and a ‘modern cosmopolitan chronotope’ of contemporariness and transnationalism. Embedded in this mix are further multiplicities of time, which altogether create a Sinocentric ‘neo-traditional’ aesthetic. The second dimension relates to the impermanence of the semiotic-materiality of the hoardings installed along the perimeter of the construction site only while the condominium is being built. The temporariness of hyper-visible representability of ‘Chineseness’, read against other similar media and communication practices in multiracial public spaces, secures a ‘semiotic-material immunity of privilege’, which renders racialized Chinese privilege in Singapore both elusive and normalised. (Chronotopes of privilege, ‘Chinese privilege’, ‘chronotopic bricolage’, neo-traditional aesthetic, condominium advertising, critical semiotic landscape studies)*

Key terms in language and culture (hereafter Key terms) is an ambitious collection of 75 short essays on concepts central to linguistic anthropology and related fields. This book began as an informational session at the American Anthropological Association meetings in 1998 and was first published as a special issue of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (vol. 9, no. 1–2, 1999). Alessandro Duranti, Key terms' chief editor and architect, is an experienced navigator in the varied terrain of language and culture research; he is also the author of Linguistic anthropology, a comprehensive textbook that covers the discipline's major theoretical and methodological contributions. In Key terms, Duranti appeals to the expertise of 74 other scholars working on questions central to language and culture research. The result is a powerful and eclectic volume that brings together core concepts from anthropology, linguistics, folklore, philosophy, sociology, and psychology, among other fields.

Ruth Mace, Clare J. Holden and Stephen Shennan (eds.), The evolution of cultural diversity: A phylogenetic approach. London: UCL Press, 2005 Pp. x, 291. Pb $34.95.

This book is in two parts, the first of which presents papers on unified anthropological themes and the second, coevolutionary approaches to some anthropological questions, involving the integration of findings from more than one anthropological field.

In this book, author Salikoko Mufwene offers a chronology of his views on language evolution as they have developed over the past 12 years. Mufwene understands the linguistic evolutionary process in terms of a language's external ecology – that is, its position relative to other languages with which it moves in and out of contact, the power relations among groups of different language varieties in the setting, and so on – as well as its internal ecology, or the coexistence in a given setting of the linguistic features, and their relative weight. Although Mufwene uses creole languages as a starting point, his purpose is to highlight general characteristics of language evolution; he argues that, in the essentials of language change, varieties such as pidgins and creoles differ little if at all from non-pidgins and non-creoles. To build his case, Mufwene draws from population genetics, seeing any given language not as an organism but rather as its own “species.”

Kay McCormick, Language in Cape Town's District Six. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. xv + 253 pp.

Kay McCormick's book is a multifaceted analysis of language norms and language practices in the bilingual District Six of Cape Town (South Africa). District Six is probably the best-known inner city neighborhood of Cape Town: In the 1980s the eyes of the world witnessed the forced removal of many of its inhabitants and the brutal demolition of homes in yet another attempt by the apartheid government to get rid of a cosmopolitan and ethnically mixed area. The area is relatively well defined, and its language contact situation makes it an excellent site for the study of language alternation and code-switching.

Carol Myers-Scotton, Contact linguistics: Bilingual encounters and grammatical outcomes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. xiv, 342. Pb.

The scope of Myers-Scotton's new book is far wider than that of her earlier study (1993), which focused exclusively on code-switching. She has now applied her Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model to a much broader range of language contact phenomena, covering areas such as convergence (what others have termed “interference”), language attrition and shift, and creoles and mixed languages. There is no doubt that the model does offer many insights into the dynamics of various types of language contact, and while Myers-Scotton's remarks remain fairly tentative with regard to some of these fields, this book certainly opens up new avenues for exploration in each of them. However, the most substantial and possibly the most controversial part of the book is again that which presents the latest developments in her account of bilingual code-switching, which has already achieved worldwide renown, so for want of space we will focus only on this part of the book.

This study focuses on the tensions around Portugal's language policies and citizens’ perceptions of their linguistic rights in the context of the current orthographic reform. Unlike other linguistic rights studies, this enquiry does not focus on endangered languages or linguistic minorities. Instead, there are three major ingredients that embody linguistic-rights claims by European Portuguese speakers: the right to be heard on orthographic reform in a democratic society, ownership and authenticity of the Portuguese language, and the need for protection against external (or, more specifically, Brazilian) hegemony. A critical discourse analysis approach to the arguments put forward by European Portuguese opponents of the orthographic reform shows that the ongoing discussion: (i) is neither about language nor about rights, but about competition; (ii) is based on linguistic dichotomies and recategorization of speakers and languages; (iii) manipulates the rhetoric of threat, endangerment, linguistic rights, and democracy; and (iv) opens up intra-linguistic and inter-variety spaces for conceptualizing linguistic rights claims. (Language ideological debate, public understanding, language planning, linguistic rights, orthographic reform)

Michael Bamberg and Molly Andrews (eds.), Considering counter-narratives: Narrating, resisting, making sense. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004. Pp. x, 381. HB $126.00.

Growing out of two special issues of the journal Narrative Inquiry, this volume assembles six chapters that “contemplate the meaning of counter-narratives and their relationship to master or dominant narratives” (p. x). The book also contains six clusters of commentaries written in response to each of the focal chapters, along with rejoinders by the six “primary” authors. As the editors point out in their introduction to the book, the format of dialogue and contestation is meant to synergize with the main subject of the volume, since the concept “counter-narrative” is itself “a positional category, in tension with another category” (x). By and large, the organization of the volume is effective and makes for stimulating reading; occasionally, however, commentators treat the chapter to which they are ostensibly responding less as an opportunity for dialogue than as a platform for showcasing their own explanatory frameworks or descriptive nomenclatures (see, e.g., the commentary by Jaan Valsiner, 245–76). More generally, the range of issues explored by the 29 different contributors to the volume – the range of contexts in which the authors and commentators show narrative and narrative analysis to be pertinent concerns – suggests the extent to which the “narrative turn” has taken hold in fields such as social psychology, gender studies, sociolinguistics, public health, and the other domains of research represented in the book. But by the same token, the volume raises the question of whether the contributors share a sense of what narrative is and how it functions – that is, whether they are in fact investigating a common object (or set of common objects: narrative, master narrative, counter-narrative), or rather operating with more or less distinct conceptions of stories and methodologies for studying them.

Walt Wolfram & Natalie Schilling-Estes, American English: Dialects and variation. (Language in Society, 25). 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. Pp. xv, 452. Pb $36.95.

American English, an introductory textbook about dialect variation, is a revised version of the textbook that first appeared in 1998 and represents another addition to the array of educational materials about American dialects that the first author has been producing for over three decades. It is a versatile textbook with an intended audience of any student who takes a “course on dialects” (p. x). Its lack of linguistic formalism and statistics makes it accessible to students with no linguistics background, and its continued emphasis on the relevance of dialect awareness to American society will help non-linguists apply the material effectively. Owing to its wide scope, it cannot delve too deeply into any of the theoretical issues; however, its succinct overviews of the debates, annotated bibliographies at the end of each chapter, and copious examples from a range of dialects make it a useful reference for experienced linguists.

Haas's (1944) typology of nonreferential gender indexicality attested three basic varieties: speaker indexing, addressee indexing, and ‘mixed’ (or relational) speaker-addressee gender indexing. In an earlier publication in Language in Society this author adopted the same framework for the treatment of a large sample of cases of categorical gender indexicality. However, subsequent review of cases where gender indexicality seemingly interacts with sex-based semantic gender suggests that Haas' typology is incomplete. A relational speaker-referent indexing type is proposed. Focusing on gender indexicality in Chiquitano (Bolivia) and Yanyuwa (Australia), the author argues that these cases have been erroneously treated as systems in which speaker gender is indexed in the denotation of referent gender. It is shown that a more parsimonious analysis can account for these cases by means of a single purely pragmatic gender feature distributed over a relational speaker-referent indexical focus. (Gender, indexicality, deixis)*