An analysis of the salutations of seventy-five letters of application for an academic position at a large southwestern university showed that a majority of the writers (forty-seven as compared to twenty-eight) had become sensitive to the problems of beginning a letter to an unknown person or group with a masculine greeting. The twenty-eight applicants who used masculine greetings used only four different forms. But the forty-seven applicants who chose to use sex-neutral greetings had no well-established pattern to follow. Hence, they used nineteen different forms, which shows that the matter is currently in a state of experimentation. From an analysis of the candidates' supporting data, it was clear that the writers who used the sex-neutral greetings were the better qualified candidates. Females were more inclined than males to use sex-neutral greetings. And there was a correlation between the part of the country where a candidate lived and whether or not a sex-neutral greeting was chosen. (Sexism, diachronic linguistics, regional dialectology)

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.

This is a compendium of articles, originally published elsewhere, that focus on language, education, and culture in Pakistan, where the author has spent most of his career. As he admits in the general introduction, the articles were not initially written as chapters for a book, so they do not each focus on a single argument; but since they have these three themes as they relate to Pakistan as their organizing idea, with few other sources to guide us, we can get some general ideas about these issues as they play out in Pakistan.

This is a collection of studies of identity in the framework of Conversation Analysis. Many of the essays make explicit use of Harvey Sacks's descriptions of the “membership categorization devices” by which people construct attributions of identity in the course of interaction, as a way of accomplishing particular, situated goals. Many mount explicit arguments against psychological accounts of personal identity and social categorization according to which people bring preexisting identities into interactions. With one or two exceptions, the contributions are well argued, clearly written, and free of the jargon that sometimes makes work in Conversation Analysis inaccessible to outsiders. Readers of Language in Society should find the collection thought-provoking.

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)*

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.

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).

In the introduction to this book, the reader follows Wilson Nyanforth, a 35-year-old Kru civil servant, through his morning in New Krutown, Monrovia, Liberia. As Nyanforth travels to work, he uses Kru and English separately and in combination, his language choices varying with the setting and the participants in the encounter. His greeting to his boss is an example: “Good morning Honorable Tarpeh, na kl[backwards c]ba (my chief)!” Breitborde's monograph on language choices of Kru-speaking inhabitants of New Krutown has many such specific case studies of language in use: these illustrate his claims and make the book accessible to readers. But his goal is to do more than provide descriptive case studies. He writes: “I ask how the choices urban Kru persons make to speak English embody certain aspects of contemporary social relations and cultural values, not simply within the community of speakers but also linking them to the Liberian national polity. In this sense, then, I attempt to integrate both the (societal) macrolevel and the (individual) microlevel in the exploration of the social meaning of English”.