Neal Hutcheson (producer and director). Mountain talk. Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Language and Life Project, 2003. DVD $20.

Twenty years ago, I met many of my grandmother's fifty-odd cousins for the first time. Born in Panther Hollow, North Carolina (pronounced “Painter Holler”), my grandmother moved to the nearest town, Asheville, when she was a child. On the occasion of her seventieth birthday, many of the cousins she left behind came down out of the mountains to celebrate with her. A few of them spoke in a unique dialect, a “brogue” riddled with odd turns of phrase and vocabulary.

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.

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.

Conversation analysis has opened up a new frontier for both Conversation Analysis (CA) and second-language acquisition (SLA). It is a gutsy and timely book. As a first endeavor of its kind, it ventures to apply an increasingly popular discourse analytic methodology to a field whose research has traditionally been governed by experimental paradigms. It also strikes an impressive balance between theoretical considerations and empirical analyses. The book begins with purely theoretical discussions on the larger issues that govern the two fields, then moves on to incorporate empirical data in illustrating the possibility of connecting them. The theory-to-practice continuum is completed by applying CA to two SLA-related collections of data. In a remarkable way, the author manages to become fully engaged in micro-analytic procedures without for a moment losing sight of the larger pictures that motivated these procedures.

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.”

The present issue presents the continuation of work begun at a symposium on child discourse held at the meetings of the American Anthropological Association in 1974. The papers presented there were subsequently published (Mitchell-Kernan & Ervin-Tripp icy). These papers on social discourse all dealt with children's sociolinguistic skills applied to conversation. Among the topics we explored together, the sequencing and function of children's discourse was a problem of particular interest and complexity. Therefore, following the first symposium, the participants planned another for the purpose of discussing sequencing in child discourse. The papers presented at the second symposium, held at the 1975 meetings of the American Anthropological Association, are included here in revised form. These papers indicate the complexity of the issues related to the structure of children's discourse. Sequencing, for instance, appears to be more than a matter of linguistic rules, or even a matter of turn-taking between speakers. Rather, the choice of linguistic forms, of speech acts or routines, like the choice of whether to speak or to communicate in some other way, seems to be determined by interactional strategies as well as linguistic rules. Interactional strategies, in turn, reveal assumptions that speakers appear to hold about the nature of the participants and the most appropriate and effective way to use language in interactions with them. A consensus concerning the importance and implications of interactional strategies can be discerned in these papers, and this is the central theme of this volume.

This study continues an investigation of lexical acculturation in Native American languages using a sample of 292 language cases distributed from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego (Brown 1994). Focus is on the areal diffusion of native language words for imported European Objects and concepts. Approximately 80% of all sharing of such terms is found to occur among closely genetically related languages. Amerindian languages only distantly related, or not related at all, tend to share native labels for acculturated items only when these have diffused to them from a lingua franca, such as Chinook Jargon (a pidgin trade language of the Pacific Northwest Coast) or Peruvian Quechua (the language of the Inca empire). Lingua francas also facilitate diffusion of terms through genetically related languages; but sometimes, as in the case of Algonquian languages, these are neither familiar American pidgins nor languages associated with influential nation states. An explanatory framework is constructed around the proposal that degree of bilingualism positively influences extent of lexical borrowing. (Amerindian languages, bilingualism, language contact, lexical acculturation, lexical diffusion, lingua francas)

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 book is the second volume of the Handbook of perceptual dialectology. Expanding on the coverage of both regions and methodologies, its aim is to underline the importance of considering folk (i.e., non-linguists') conceptions and perceptions of and responses to dialect phenomena in general, and to language differences in particular. Perceptual dialectology, or even “folk dialectology,” is nowadays understood – thanks to the work pioneered by Dennis Preston over the past two decades – as a multidisciplinary macro-linguistic and micro-sociolinguistic approach within the field of folk linguistics, an enterprise that, in general, gives added prominence to both linguistic structure and details of dialect production and perception differences and attitudes, complementing the more global approach of the social psychology of language. As we know, an important aspect of the complex social psychology of speech communities is the arbitrary and subjective intellectual and emotional response of the members of a society to the languages and varieties in their social environment: Different language varieties are often associated with deep-rooted emotional responses – in short, with social attitudes, such as thoughts, feelings, stereotypes, and prejudices about people, about social, ethnic and religious groups, and about political entities. These non-linguists' emotional responses and perceptions of dialects and dialect divisions may, paradoxically, not coincide with those proposed by linguists, since cultural, social, political, economic, or historical facts or other circumstances within the speech community may lead to the belief that there is a linguistic boundary or a sociolinguistic barrier where in reality there is none, or vice versa. Crucially important, then – as Preston's work has emphasized – is the comparison of scientific and folk characterizations of sociolectal and/or geolectal varieties and areas. Such an approach builds a more complete and accurate picture of the speaker's linguistic behavior, in the context of its complex social psychology, as well as of the regard for language use and variety within the community, in our sociolinguistically based search for an understanding of the dynamics of speech communities.

This book, an extensively revised version of a 1992 dissertation from the University of Amsterdam, presents a wealth of information about the culture, documented history, and languages of the Canadian Métis – an ethnic group descended from French and other European fur traders and hunters and their Native American wives. The Métis live in several areas in the Canadian West, as well as parts of North Dakota, Montana, and further afield. This group has been a recognized and clearly constituted ethnic entity in the region since at least the mid-19th century. The focus throughout Bakker's book is on the nature and origin of Michif, the unique language that has brought the Métis (especially those who traditionally hunted buffalo and who came from the Red River of Saskatchewan) to the attention of students of intimate language contact. Michif has possibly been in existence as a language since the 1840s (p. 160), although actual attestations of linguistic material date only from the early 1970s.

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.

Elise Kärkkäinen, Epistemic stance in English conversation: A description of its interactional functions, with a focus on I think. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 115). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. ix, 207. Hb $102.00.

In this innovative study of epistemic stance marking in English conversation, Elise Kärkkäinen attempts to cross-fertilize discourse-functional linguistics with conversation analysis, and her effort bears fruit. She moves deftly between quantitative and qualitative methods, juxtaposing frequency tables with conversational transcripts, and comes out with a bold thesis in hand: “Showing commitment to the status of the information that one is providing, i.e. marking epistemic stance … [is] an essentially interactive activity” (p. 183).

Adam Kendon, Gesture: Visible action as utterance. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. 410. Hb $90.00.

Written by one of the foremost authorities on the subject, this book gives a definitive account of gesture and its study. It is an excellent and thought-provoking work for all readers interested in everyday interactions across various disciplines. The book can be divided into two parts: The first six chapters present a detailed history of gesture studies dating back to Roman antiquity and continuing to the twentieth century, especially in the Western tradition. The latter half of the book provides micro-analyses of gesture practices occurring in everyday interactions in various settings.