Clyne has shown great skill in compiling and editing this volume; it contains a wealth of information on language planning and language policies, and will be widely cited in the future. The book contains fourteen case studies, apparently specially commissioned, on corpus language planning from a wide range of societies in a number of global regions: Southeast and East Asia (China, the Philippines, Vietnam), Western Europe (Belgium, Germany, Norway), Eastern Europe (Hungary, Moldavia, Ukraine), the Balkans (the former Yugoslavia), the Middle East (Turkey, Israel, Jordan), Southern Africa (South Africa), and Central America (Nicaragua), as well as the Jewish diaspora (in the case of Yiddish).

This is a collection of twenty matchless essays on the subject of language contact (Quechua, Guaraní, and occasionally Aymara in contact with Spanish). The first one serves as an introduction to the main theme and as a justification for the author's rejection of certain methodologies. “Observaciones metodológicas sobre la investigación sociolingüística en Hispanoamérica” (pp. 7–18) offers an excellent review of stratificational sociolinguistics, a field the author proves to know but prefers to discard on the basis of its inadequacy for studying marginalized Amerindian communities. The major deterrent is the application of quantitative methods to populations that do not belong to post-industrialized societies, where the continua of social strata and sociolinguistic variables are more easily grasped with contemporary methods of the social sciences. In contrast, groups in Latin American societies display wider socio-economic and socio-political gaps, not to mention massive peripheral strata.

Dagmar Dueber, Nigerian Pidgin English: Language contact, variation and change in an African urban setting. London: Battlebridge, 2005. Pp. xiii, 273. Pb £25.

This is a corpus-based study of Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) among the educated in the urban center of Lagos. Deuber's report on the use of NPE in Lagos makes for interesting comparison with the spread and use of other contact varieties in urban areas in Africa (e.g., Sheng in Nairobi; see Fink 2005 and references therein) and its impact on indigenous languages. It is also comparable with the discussions of urban varieties of creoles reported in Patrick's (1999) work and more recently in Hackert 2004. One of the obvious issues is the functioning of the variety in new public formal domains. Issues related to both corpus and status planning are discussed (cf. Devonish 1986). To help the reader navigate the vast amount of data, there are several maps, sample questionnaires, and complete transcriptions from elicitations and interviews. The included CD contains sociodemographic data for all the informants and background information on the texts, translations, and sound samples. The book should prove beneficial to sociolinguists of varying persuasions, especially creolists, variationists, and discourse analysts.

We explore two stance-taking patterns in casual Hebrew conversation involving ya′ani/ya′anu, a discourse marker originating in colloquial Arabic. In the first, ya′ani/ya′anu, the same as Arabic yaʕni (lit. ‘it means’), frames reformulations of prior discourse serving to enhance interpersonal involvement and mutuality regarding the interlocutor's stance toward what has been said, thereby constructing intersubjectivity. The second pattern consists of a prosodic variant, ya′ani/ya′anu, functioning as a double-voiced ironic hedge. The latter is an innovation of Hebrew, brought about by its functional association with Hebrew ke′ilu ‘like’. The two uses of ya′ani/ya′anu elucidate two different processes that discourse markers in language contact situations may undergo: persistence of lexically motivated metalingual meaning, and extension of lexically unmotivated meaning. The considerably low frequency of ya′ani/ya′anu vis-à-vis ke′ilu is explained by its devaluated social meaning in current Israeli discourse, as an index of nonhegemonic religious and ethnic groups such as Arabs and Mizrahi Jews. (Discourse markers, language contact, stance-taking, (re)formulations, irony, metalanguaging, indexicality, intersubjectivity)*

Peter Garrett, Nikolas Coupland & Angie Williams, Investigating language attitudes: Social meanings of dialect, ethnicity and performance. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003. x + 251 pp. Hb $79.95.

As its title suggests, this book focuses on attitudes to language and dialect production, perception, and use, and particularly on attitudes to language variation, dialect, speech style, language preference, and minority languages as well as their speakers. As we know, an important aspect of the complex social psychology of speech communities is the arbitrary and subjective intellectual and emotional response of a society's members to the languages and varieties in their social environment: Different language varieties are often associated with deep-rooted emotional responses – social attitudes, in short – such as thoughts, feelings, stereotypes, and prejudices about people, about social, ethnic and religious groups, and about political entities. These emotional responses and perceptions of language and dialect phenomena are biased by cultural, social, political, economic, or historical facts or other circumstances within the speech community. Sociolinguistically based research may build 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 within the community, and may further understanding of the dynamics of speech communities as well as of the subjective life of language varieties.

This volume contributes to the study of language ideology by focusing on the historical processes through which ideological positions about the relationship of language and society are produced and reproduced. Specifically, the contributors seek to contextualize the ways that language ideologies are contested in particular, often well publicized debates about language and its relationships to society. While ostensibly about linguistic issues, these debates, at one level or another, also address questions of power and national identity.