In his Introduction to Volume I of Sacks's Lectures on conversation (1992), Emmanuel Schegloff observes (1992:lviii) that his own effort at overview was “truly daunting,” mostly because of “the extraordinary richness and multi-facetedness of Sacks's corpus … In its variety, depth, and freshness of vision it defies domestication into convenient guidelines to a reader.” Such a statement – indeed, any reading of the two-volume set of Lectures – should give pause to someone attempting a textbook rendering of Sacks and his work. But such a text is precisely what Silverman has produced, and the effort is remarkably successful on its own terms.

This is a collection of 21 essays from the 20th International L.A.U.D. (Linguistic Agency University of Duisburg) Symposium, held from Feb. 28 to March 3, 1995, at the University of Duisburg, Germany. In the words of the editor of the collection, the authors “explore the relations between social, psychological and (socio)linguistic aspects of language contact and language conflict situations both from a theoretical and an applied linguistics perspective” (x). The volume is divided into four sections: “Sociolinguistic and linguistic issues,” “Language policy and language planning,” “Language use and attitudes towards language(s),” and “Code-switching: One speaker, two languages.” Rather than discuss all 21 articles, I will focus on several whose themes are relevant to a number of areas of sociolinguistics.

In 1964 the late Harvey Sacks began to present his now-famous lectures on conversation at UCLA (Sacks 1992, vol. 1). By the decade's end, as he continued his lectures at UC Irvine (Sacks 1992, vol. 2), the first published instance of the work that had come to be known as Conversation Analysis (Schegloff 1968) introduced this developing perspective to a broader public. In the early 1970s Sacks and Schegloff, along with their colleague Gail Jefferson, pursued their research on the organization of talk-in-interaction and published a number of articles that remain foundational (e.g. Schegloff & Sacks 1973, Sacks et al. 1974).

These two collections of articles offer a spectrum of current work in the field of language and gender. Contributors to both volumes include some leading researchers in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis from Britain, America, and New Zealand; the Kotthoff & Wodak book also contains work by contributors from Germany, Sweden, Holland, and Austria. Despite the latter volume's stated aim of bridging the gap in scholarly awareness between Europe and the English-speaking world, we are in effect still dealing with work from a particular section of Europe, i.e. essentially northern European and Germanic countries. With the exception of one study of Spanish women's talk, southern and Mediterranean Europe are still largely absent from the language and gender research scene presented here.

This is a book about feminist language reform. The subject is not exactly neglected; since the late 1970s there has been no shortage either of practical guides to nonsexist language (for English see, inter alia, Miller & Swift 1980) or of historical, descriptive, and theoretical discussions (book-length examples include Nilsen et al. 1977, Vetterling-Braggin 1981, and Baron 1986). Pauwels's text is primarily descriptive, though it also has theoretical and practical elements; there is an appendix advising on how to draft nonsexist language guidelines. Like most previous work on this subject, it is written by a self-identified feminist, and one who is clearly sympathetic to the general project of feminist language reform. But that is not to say that Pauwels breaks no new ground: in fact, Women changing language has two important distinguishing features.

Until recently, legal anthropologists have treated talk as a source of information about conflict rather than as a techno-political device used by participants in the conflict. From Malinowski to Gluckman to Bohannan, conflict – between social classes, ethnic groups, individuals and society, or individual interactants – has always been one of the major concerns of socio-cultural anthropology. Yet the classic studies yielded very little knowledge of how people actually manage conflict in interaction. They suffered from an absence of detailed primary data and elected to present summaries, reports by native sources, or reports from meetings held to resolve the conflict. In sum, those studies analyzed the law as a set of cases and rules, rather than a contested field of linguistic practices.

In his preface, Knowles makes clear what his book is not. It is not a history of literary English, and it is not an account of changes in linguistic form; it is a “cultural history.” In the introductory chapter, he declares: “In view of the close connection between language and power, it is impossible to treat the history of the language without reference to politics” (9). Of course, books that purport to be histories of English have often “treated” the subject without apparent politics. Knowles is right in alleging that the politics of such books has often been implicit, since most of them provide information about the ascent of one variety of the language to the elevated status of a standard – as if that were an inevitable and desirable result of the spirit of goodness working itself out through speech.

The work of Elinor Ochs and Catherine Snow has demonstrated the central importance of dinner talk within a broad picture of language socialization. A fertile site for the intergenerational transmission of cultural values and identities, it fosters culturally specific ways of talking and thinking which have significance for children's lives far beyond the intimacy of family meals. Blum-Kulka brings to this rich speech event her insights about cross-cultural pragmatics and her deep knowledge of patterns of communication in Jewish communities in the US and Israel. What emerges from her multi-year study is a thoroughly Hymesian depiction of cultural continuity and change, as enacted in everyday talk. She demonstrates that the subtle differences and similarities in patterns of dinnertime talk found in each of three middle-class, secular Jewish speech communities of Ashkenazi heritage – Jewish Americans (JA), American immigrants to Israel (AI), and native Israelis (NI) – reflect entangled processes of cultural maintenance, cultural assimilation, and intentional breaks from the traditional values and practices of the Diaspora.

In the past fifteen years, there has been an upsurge of interest in matters social-gerontological within both sociolinguistics and communication science. This is manifest in an abundance of books, and particularly special journal issues, in an international series of conferences (at its fifth venue in Vancouver, 2001), and in a handbook on the topic (Nussbaum & Coupland 1995). Paoletti's concise paperback – the eighth in a series, “Everyday communication: Case studies of behavior in context,” edited by Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz and Stuart J. Sigman – contributes to this growing literature in important ways, not least of which are its focus on the active elderly and its recourse to Italian data.

This is a book containing reports of original research on children aged somewhere between seven and eighteen. All the contributors are based in the US, and with one exception all the thirteen studies were also carried out in the US; the exception, by Marilyn Merritt, also incorporates material from work which she has done in various parts of the African continent. Taken together, the studies cover many aspects of these young people's lives – home, school, playground, voluntary group meetings and work schemes. In most cases, one is struck by the extensive fieldwork which lies behind these research reports. Long periods of observation seem to be commonplace; and the efforts are impressive because, as Shirley Brice Heath points out in her chapter, obtaining naturalistic data from young people of this age can pose problems regarding both access and quality of data. In almost all cases, a corpus of audio or audio-visual recordings forms a basis for at least part of the analysis, though chapters are generally written so as to focus on only a small set of conversation extracts – a strategy which often does little justice to the range of data gathered within the research.

Within the fields of health communication and medical sociology, there is growing interest in exploring the social and interactional character of health and illness. This interest results, in large part, from the recognition that the very foundations of a society's notions of health are inextricably rooted in the social. With the present book, we have one of the first interactional studies of a family's experience with a particular illness: bulimia. Beach provides a glimpse into the way that family members both talk about, and talk into being, the health problems of one of its members. Removing the notion of illness from the individual, psychological experience is not an especially novel idea; but Beach's location of it in the interactional details of a conversation between a grandmother and granddaughter is quite notable.

Among the most relevant, practical issues in the courtroom – and explicitly recognized by attorneys well in advance of their occurrence – are the potential dilemmas involved in the questioning of witnesses. Practicing attorneys (and often their trial consultants) spend much time considering strategies for managing these. If we do X, this will happen; if we do Y, that will happen. Komter's book is a fine-grained and multiplex analysis of the interactional dilemmas that confront courtroom participants in cases of violent crime in the Netherlands. Using a conversation-analytic/ethnomethodological framework, she examines the communicative dilemmas that arise in a system with both adversarial and inquisitorial elements, and she shows how these dilemmas are shaped by the institutional interests of the participants. In a much broader sense, her study continues a strong empirical program initiated by Atkinson & Drew 1979 on the attribution and negotiation of blame in accusation sequences; but other readers may find Komter's work strikingly reminiscent of Pomerantz's classic analysis (1978) of the interactional dilemmas that shape compliment responses.

Devoted to addressing various aspects of doctor–patient interactions, this comprehensive volume explores how patient-subjectivities get positioned and constructed as turns unfold into each other in ongoing interactions. Though recent research in conversation and narrative analysis has addressed features of patient-talk (Hamilton 1995, Ferrara 1994), few writers have seriously considered how issues of power are embedded in the language that patients and doctors use to each other, as well as in the genres that contain the talk. AV adds to our knowledge of these critical issues through an in-depth, incisive analysis of her data.

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”.

The authors have compiled a truly impressive amount of information pertaining to bilingualism and bilingual education in this single-volume, full-color encyclopedia. Attractively produced on high-quality paper, the book contains 117 main topics, 390 text boxes, 340 pictures, 35 maps, 98 graphs, and 14 diagrams. There are also a glossary, a bibliography containing more than 2,000 entries, and an index. The book is organized into four sections – “Individual bilingualism,” “Languages in society,” “Languages in contact in the world” (with “Language maps of the world”), and “Bilingual education” – each with many subsections.

This book hooks the reader (linguist and non-) through real-life, high-stakes cases and a very readable style. Shuy brings his scholarship and humanity to this work as he introduces us to the communicative event of the confession within the culture of the law enforcement community in the United States. His examples show us how linguists can apply their knowledge and skills. He also speaks to the law enforcement community, and to the interested non-linguist.

In his book The sacred canopy, Peter Berger wrote, that in the last analysis, “society” is people banded together in the face of death (1967:51). Adelman and Frey have written a small but fascinating study about this very topic. Theirs is an ethnographic study on a residential facility called Bonaventure House (BH), run by a Catholic order, the Alexian Brothers of America. The residents suffer from AIDS; and during the time of the study, BH was for most of them their last home before death. Using participant observation, interviews and questionnaires, Adelman & Frey set out to study how community is built and sustained in these circumstances: People afflicted by a dreaded illness share their everyday lives; death occurs regularly; and the departed are replaced by new people, who become part of the community.

The assumptions made by readers of Language in Society and other English-language academic publications, when they begin to read, are so widely shared that they are seldom reflected on or made explicit. These assumptions have to do with European traditions of scholarship; and over time, they have made their way around the world because of the unquestioned belief in their universal applicability. But other approaches do exist, although most are never featured in publications in Western languages. I commented on this situation long ago, but it persists to this day: “The work done by Japanese sociolinguists is virtually unknown to non-Japanese readers. The reason is probably that this work has developed independently of the Western disciplines. The fact that Japanese researchers have worked independently of the Western tradition has inevitably resulted in unique assumptions, orientations or approaches when viewed from an international perspective”.

The language of science has been extensively studied by linguists and rhetoricians – as a distinctive register, as a set of genres that students and academics need to master, and as a discourse of powerful social institutions. Most of these studies have been synchronic, focusing on the structures or styles of more or less contemporary texts, particularly research articles. But if we rely on such studies, we may tend to reify some features of text (such as the Introduction–Methods–Results–Discussion form, or the tendency to passive constructions and nominalizations) as inevitable features of scientific communication. We may also treat scientific institutions – such as the lines between disciplines, or between professionals and amateurs – as given by the subject matter, rather than seeing them as changing and as constituted in part by their communicative practices.

This is a very contemporary book. By anchoring his discussion on English Language Teaching (ELT) in Hong Kong at the widely watched pivotal point of transition from British to Chinese sovereignty, Pennycook is able to range backward to ELT in India, and to construct a narrative of the adherence between the discourse of colonialism and the discourse(s) of ELT. Worldwide, ELT is a major industry. It collects practitioners who range in background from specialists in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, with Ph.D.s and research grants, to those who have few or no credentials beyond having been born into an English-speaking community and enjoying world travel. This book should find a significant and large audience among these teachers; but somehow one wonders if it will.