It is unusual for a collection of articles to be as interesting and valuable (while simultaneously diverse) as are the articles assembled here. The papers in this excellent collection reflect the dramatic change that language and gender research has undergone in the past decade, and as such they provide an extremely useful source for anyone seeking a fresh view of the research in this field.

This is an important contribution to the growing debate about the close links of polities to language, which is the innermost component of a nation and its culture, and the main support of the latter. Thus the book will be highly attractive to anyone interested in sociolinguistics and nation-building. It contains four parts: a general reflection on how language policy and linguistic culture have been perceived by scholars up to now, followed by studies of three national situations where these problems have been faced – France, India, and the US – with emphasis in each country on an important regional case (Alsace, Tamil Nadu, and California). Schiffman is able to speak about each case through personal experience of living and working on the spot.

Crowley's research into eighteenth-, twentieth-, and especially nineteenth-century writings about the English language is rare in its almost philological coverage and depth. What makes it unique is that it is conducted within an intellectual framework that is solidly “marxist” (with a small m, as Crowley now spells it), though not entirely immune to other strains of Theory (with a capital T). Crowley's marxism falls within that British tradition whose last great exponent was the Cambridge critic Raymond Williams – who has also inspired much of Crowley's method and style, and from those work the main title is taken (“Language in history: That full field,” Williams 1983:189).

It's tough to review an interior volume of a continuing, multivolume work like DARE, especially when previous volumes (1, 1985; 2, 1991) have been so thoroughly reviewed and so well received – and when many readers of LiS may already be familiar with the series. Reviewers of the first volume could comment on the history of DARE, its goals and methodologies, the unique problems encountered during its development along with their solutions, and its innovations – such as the clever maps which still give a recognizable US, though skewed according to population density. Reviewers of the final volume will be able to look back over the entire series, casting a critical eye on the overall success of the endeavor and evaluating its success as a work of scholarship. Nevertheless, I will do my best to concentrate on the volume at hand, although some glances forward and backward are inevitable.

For readers who are interested in learning how and why speakers select among competing language varieties, Goldstein's critical ethnography of immigrant factory workers in Toronto provides compelling documentation. She was employed as an on-site teacher of English as a Second Language (ESL) at Stone Specialities, a manufacturing company that hired large numbers of Portuguese-speaking workers from the Azores. The workplace ESL classes were less successful than expected, so she undertook an in-depth ethnographic study to determine why.

“Disorders of discourse” – practices that constitute “barriers to communication” – can be subjected to critique, and critique can lead to the suggestion of different practices. Such changes in discourse may contribute to changes in the “structures of organizations.” However, in the absence of such structural changes, changes in discourse may actually result in more subtle, and thus more effective, forms of domination. That is the central problem raised in this book. Interaction between doctors and patients, teachers and pupils, politicians and publics, etc., can change in ways that eliminate the more obvious forms of interactional asymmetry, domination, or manipulation; yet whether such changes contribute to substantive democratization – or only give an appearance of democracy, which can make relations of domination more effective because less obvious – depends on how such new forms of interaction fit within the overall network of practices that constitutes the institution concerned.

This, the fourth American anthology about language and sexual minorities, is more consistently professional, more focused on written texts, less focused on explicating rhetorical effects, and considerably more focused on gender than its predecessors (Chesebro 1981, Ringer 1994, and Leap 1995). Why “sexuality” is included in the subtitle at all is a mystery. In contrast to Leap's pioneering collection, sexual practices are almost entirely invisible (inaudible?) herein. The editors claim to have “collected a series of articles that approach the study of language from the twin perspectives of gender and sexuality, conceived as separate but intricately linked categories” (p. 5); but it seems that, in utero, gender throttled sexuality (while sex, either in the sense of biological differences or in the sense of tactile contact, was never conceived).

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 book calls attention to an area of language and gender research that has been too long overlooked. Most studies in the field have centered either on women or on comparative analyses of women's and men's linguistic practices, while relatively few have focused primarily on the language use of men and boys. Such an enterprise is fraught with political peril, since feminists may object that making men more central to language and gender studies necessarily detracts attention from the study of women. However, as an invisible norm, masculinity frames the gendered lives of women as well as men. The study of language and masculinity is therefore a vital part of the feminist linguistic project – linked to the study of other categories rendered normative, and hence invisible to scrutiny, such as whiteness and heterosexuality. Although Language and masculinity gives little attention to the question of how the processes of racialization and gender are mutually constituted, two chapters explore the construction of heterosexuality as part of the project of normative masculinity. While the book focuses primarily on white middle-class English speakers, it includes a wide range of national contexts, genres, and social groups, as well as theoretical and methodological approaches.

The group known as the IGLSVL, which has produced this book, grew out of a link between the Department of Language and Linguistic Science of the University of York, England, and the Institut de Psychologie of the Université Louis Pasteur of Strasbourg, France. The group has been meeting every other year since 1986 and disseminating workshop discussions in mimeographed form. It is our good fortune that they decided, at their 1992 meeting, to publish the results of their work for wider distribution. The resulting volume, here under review, does an outstanding job of presenting an international survey, particularly rich in insider's views, of the advantages of vernacular literacy, as well as the difficulties of achieving it.

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.

Fifty years after the nations of South Asia gained their independence from Britain, the language of the colonialists remains very much alive in the region. In fact, in some respects it is even more alive than at the time of departure – as witnessed by the efflorescence of South Asian writers in English of international stature, to the extent that the New Yorker has devoted the major part of an issue to them (June 23–30, 1997).

This book presents six useful and very informative papers on countries in which English either is the single dominant language or assumes the role of a major language alongside others. The first category of countries includes Australia (discussed by Michael Herriman), Britain (Linda Thompson et al.) and the US (Thomas Ricento). The latter category includes South Africa, now notable for its eleven-language policy (Stanley Ridge) and Canada (Barbara Burnaby), where French has become a major competitor in the sociolinguistic field. New Zealand (Richard Benton) takes a kind of middle position as a predominantly English-speaking country in which Maori has become an official language.

This book reminds us that code-switching is not only a classic topic, but also an important and highly challenging one. In distinction from previous studies, this work reveals that a bilingual community of second-generation Japanese Canadians (Niseis), in Toronto, has three distinct types of bilingual speech: a basically Japanese variety, a basically English variety, and a mixed variety. Nishimura analyzes these three bilingual speech varieties and provides an answer to the fundamental question in code-switching: “Who speaks what language to whom, and on what occasions?” That is, this research ascribes the motivation of this variability to the “intended audience.” These Niseis choose the basically Japanese variety when they speak to native Japanese people; when they speak to fellow Niseis who have always lived in Canada, they choose the basically English variety; and when they speak to a group comprising both native Japanese and Niseis, they use the mixed variety, oscillating between Japanese and English. They switch among these codes even in the middle of storytelling. What is important here, for the bilingual speakers, is to address two questions: “Who is present in the audience of the ongoing conversational situation?”; and more specifically, “To whom is the current production of this utterance directed?”

In her editorial Introduction (1–7), Thomason notes that study of the results of intense language contact – as in pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages – has hitherto been heavily biased in favor of instances of pidgins/creoles in which the lexifier languages have been European. One aim of this volume is to redress the balance by considering contact languages that have not involved a European lexifier. More significantly, this brings to the fore social and/or structural properties that differ from those in the contact languages that have formed much of traditional lore. This volume brings together studies on the following 12 contact languages: Hiri Motu (Tom Dutton, 9–41), Pidgin Delaware (Ives Goddard, 43–98), Ndyuka-Trio Pidgin (George L. Huttar & Frank J. Velantie, 99–124), Arabic-based pidgins and creoles (Jonathan Owens, 125–72), Kitúba (Salikoko S. Mufwene, 173–208), Sango (Helma Pasch, 209–70), Swahili (Derek Nurse, 271–94), Michif (Peter Bakker & Robert A. Papen, 295–363), Media Lengua (Pieter Muysken, 365–426), Callahuaya (Pieter Muysken, 427–47), Mednyj Aleut (Sarah G. Thomason, 449–68), and Ma'a (Sarah G. Thomason, 469–87).

One mainstay of the Boasian tradition in anthropological linguistics is the notion that adequate documentation of a language must consist of at least three volumes: a grammar, a dictionary, and a collection of texts. This convention grew out of Boas's dogged insistence on the collection of copious texts in the native languages as a way of documenting the cultures of Native North Americans, which he believed were breaking down and disappearing. Obviously, if one were actually to make use of such texts, a grammar and a dictionary were also needed; so this practice of a necessary trilogy was established, a tradition that has continued in academic departments which carry on the Boasian heritage (illustrated by the postgraduate work and resulting publications of the editor of this journal).

Ó Riagáin has produced the sort of book that many have wished for but doubted they would see: a scrupulously dispassionate, comprehensive account of Irish language fortunes since the late 19th century, and of Irish language policies and outcomes since independence in 1922. Reading his careful, low-key book, one could easily forget that he is writing from and about a country where language issues rouse strong feelings, and also about the single most discussed case of attempted language maintenance and restoration in our time. His meticulous study allows efforts on behalf of Irish to be seen, appropriately, within a broad general framework of national development, in which the effectiveness of language policies is dependent in good part on their fit or lack of fit with the economic and social conditions of a given period.

This bilingual volume (in English and Slovak) opens with the text of the January 27, 1995 “Declaration on the occasion of the celebratory announcement of the codification of the Rusyn language in Slovakia” – printed in Rusyn, in Cyrillic, facing the English translation. Since the occasion had as much political as linguistic significance, a little background is in order. The Carpatho-Rusyns are ethnic East Slavs whose area of settlement since medieval times has been criss-crossed by shifting political boundaries. Until World War I, they lived in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Russian Empire; today Rusyn populations are found mainly in western Ukraine (600,000 to 800,000) and in Slovakia (100,000), with smaller groups in Poland, Hungary, and Romania (much as the ethnic and linguistic community of Kurds straddles the national borders of Iran, Iraq, and Turkey). There is also a small Rusyn enclave in the former Yugoslavia, whose dialect is formally recognized as an official minority language (Bačka Rusyn, or Vojvodinian-Srem Rusyn), and part of this population now finds itself in still another country: Croatia. The Rusyn subgroups, from the Bačka Rusyns to the Lemkos of Polish Galicia or the Huculs who straddle the Romanian border, have distinct dialects, as well as their own religious and literary text traditions. After World War I, most Rusyns found themselves citizens of the new republic of Czechoslovakia; but after World War II, a large part of their area was ceded to the USSR, becoming the Transcarpathian Oblast of the Ukrainian SSR.

Originating as a British doctoral dissertation, this work constitutes a meticulous, thoughtful, well-written, and sometimes critical application of variationist methodology to two domains of spoken French syntax: negation and interrogation. The work is of merit not only for the insights it provides into two key areas of French syntax, but also for the more general methodological issues it confronts, often with considerable originality. As is well known, the application of variationist methodology to syntax is controversial, but Coveney has made a convincing case that the Labovian paradigm can indeed be insightfully applied to the realm of syntactic variation.

Judgments regarding history do not figure prominently in the writing of many linguists whom I know. Such evaluations are rather the purview of world figures, their biographers and acolytes, and historians. But it is precisely a historical judgment that is the central concern of the present work by a distinguished linguist. King has a cause to plead in this book: He believes that Jawaharlal Nehru has not been treated well in the court of history with regard to his language policy, and he means to change this largely negative assessment. From the title of the book, one would have every right to expect that the book would, at the least, contain a narrative of the substance and evolution of Nehru's thinking concerning language policy for India; and the book does provide precisely such an account. In fact, King states (xii) that telling this narrative is his principal goal. But advocacy is never far from the surface. King forthrightly states that Nehru did a far better job of joining battle in India's language conflicts than he is customarily given credit for (xiii). Convincing the reader that Nehru has gotten a bad rap with regard to language policy is, I believe, the central aim of this book.