This volume is meant as a companion piece to three previous volumes published by Cambridge on language in various parts of the English-speaking world (the volume on the United States, edited by Charles Ferguson and Shirley Brice Heath, appeared in 1981, followed in 1984 by one on the British Isles edited by Peter Trudgill, and in 1991 by a volume on Australia edited by Suzanne Romaine). This collection contains 26 short articles, divided into three sets. The first set attempts to provide an overview of sociolinguistic issues in Canada from historical, demographic, and policy perspectives. The second set treats aboriginal languages and the two official languages, French and English; this set includes two articles on language teaching – restricted, however, to the teaching of international languages, mainly as first languages, and to the teaching of French as a second language through immersion methods. The third set offers language profiles of each of Canada's ten provinces, as well as of its two (now three) territories. The organization of the book is meant to provide different angles on sociolinguistic issues in Canada, but unfortunately the result too often is that material is either repeated or consistently left out.

According to feminist writings, Islamic women lack agency and power, and are oppressed compared to their Western female counterparts. A major site of such oppression is in Islamic courts, where husbands possess authority to pronounce divorce – while their subordinate wives humbly accept the decree and persevere, silently enduring the hardships that result. In stark contrast to such stereotypic images of gender relations in Islamic societies, Hirsch's beautifully written and powerful book focuses on the discursive production and reproduction of gender in Swahili Muslim courts. In so doing, it offers a quite different view of gender relations in Islamic society. In rich, fine-grained linguistic detail, Hirsch analyzes how legal processes in divorce cases not only reproduce but also undermine and transform dominant cultural images of gender.

Jones's book should fascinate two audiences: those concerned with the current state of the Welsh language, and those with a more general interest in the phenomenon of language obsolescence. Her presentation is both clearly readable and meticulous in its detail. The work centers on case studies of two sociologically similar but linguistically different communities, Rhymney and Rhosllannerchrugog, situated in different regions of Wales. These studies investigate, in parallel fashion, the varied retention both of Welsh and of its relevant local dialect across the generations. Jones demonstrates greater linguistic retention in the community where Welsh still plays a significant role in everyday social interactions (Rhosllannerchrugog), but her data also illustrate a strong trend in both communities toward the greater use of historically inappropriate forms by younger speakers. Both studies also reveal a recent loss of dialect-specific features, to the point where many schoolchildren in both towns fail even to recognize the local dialect as belonging to their own community. Jones's generational analysis is quite revealing, particularly because the current set of generations have experienced quite different social contexts with respect to the state of the language and its use in official settings.

Singapore has been much discussed as a highly developed, multilingual, multicultural city-state with a clearly articulated language policy, implemented by a strong government as part of its efforts at social engineering. Singapore's policies are variously derided and praised. Some of those who have written on the sociology of language in Singapore have reiterated government policy with little or no assessment of its meaning; thus one regularly reads that all children in Singapore receive education in English and in their mother tongue – a statement that cannot be understood without a grasp of what the concept “mother tongue” means in Singapore's socio-political system. PuruShotam's book comes from a group of scholars who are working with a theoretically informed perspective on language and ethnicity, which questions terminologies and seeks to understand how notions like “race,” “mother tongue,” and “language” work as social constructs. In Singapore this approach has been especially associated with the sociologists Geoffrey Benjamin, Sharon Siddique, Chua Beng Huat, and PuruShotam herself.

This is a very personal book, a poignant book, a compelling book, from beginning to end. The Preface sets the tone: self-reflexive and confessional. Wilce once wanted to be a medical doctor; he became instead a missionary in Bangladesh, but felt “guilt and pervasive disquiet” in that role; and while in Bengal – actually, in neighboring Calcutta – he suffered a “nightmarish” family tragedy involving medical practitioners. He later resigned from the mission and went to graduate school; then he returned to Bangladesh to study complaint and lament as expressed in one locality within the Bangla-speaking area. (“Bangla” and “Bengali” are two names for the same language. Wilce refers to the language as Bangla; so shall I.)

Although Indonesia's New Order has been thrown into disorder recently, its project of engineering an Indonesian language has been deemed a miraculous success. At Indonesian independence in 1945, the artificial administrative Malay language – used by the Dutch to administer their East Indies colonial empire – was just one of several dialects of a language spoken natively by only a few million residents of the territory. Now its descendant, Indonesian, is a “fully viable, universally acknowledged national language … clearly ascendant over hundreds of languages spoken natively among more than two hundred million Indonesians” (p. 2). Errington, author of two earlier books on Javanese, here turns his attention to that modernist state project of building Indonesian, and to evolving patterns of bilingualism among the Javanese, the demographically and politically dominant ethnic community of Indonesia. He gives us not only a detailed analysis of language use, but also a fascinating ethnographic account of Indonesian national development as it is interactionally constituted in two aptly chosen villages in the region around Solo (Surakarta). This study exemplifies an ethnographically grounded, culturally nuanced approach to bilingualism and language change.

Kuipers' book is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the Weyewa Highlands of western Sumba, an island in eastern Indonesia. His initial fieldwork in 1978 resulted in his work Power in performance (1990), about Weyewa “ritual speech” (tenda) – a set of political, religious, and personal verbal genres utilizing a large stock of traditional couplets, in which the two lines are parallel in both rhythm and meaning. Returning to the field in 1989, 1990, and 1994, Kuipers discovered that the obvious loci of change – new schools, roads, economic activities, and religious ideas – could not by themselves account for the direction of change in Weyewa language practices. Stimulated by a recent body of literature in linguistic anthropology dealing with “linguistic ideology,” Kuipers attempts in the present volume to show that changes in ritual speech genres – reinterpretations, erasures, refunctionalizations, and condensations – cannot be explained without taking into account local and imported beliefs about the nature of language.

Karl Kroeber is a distinguished professor of English at Columbia University and the son of a distinguished anthropologist, Alfred Louis Kroeber. He has been listening to Native American stories since his boyhood, and writing about them (side by side with his work on the English Romantics) for roughly twenty years. An anthology he edited in 1981, Traditional American Indian literatures: Texts and interpretations, taught me much when it appeared, and a statement Kroeber made in the introduction to that volume has stayed with me ever since. “It is our scholarship,” he wrote, “not Indian literature, which is primitive or underdeveloped.”

This book caps Michael Coe's distinguished career as a Mayanist scholar. In this book, he joins with Justin Kerr to present the formal, technical, and aesthetic characteristics of the art of writing as practiced by the pre-Columbian Maya of Mesoamerica. The collaboration of a renowned archaeologist with an equally illustrious photographer and dedicated student of Maya art has created a readable, highly informative, and well-illustrated text.

This extraordinary volume represents more than ten years of research on Louisiana Creole (LC) by a group of outstanding scholars from Indiana University, l'Université Antilles-Guyane, Tulane University, and Southeastern Louisiana University. Both historical and contemporary sources are used for indexing, alphabetically and trilingually (English, French, and LC), the spoken form of the LC lexical items. The resulting collection of material is astonishing in its scope of knowledge, and comprehensive in its depth of detail. With more than 5,000 entries, this excellent work provides access through vocabulary to the history and culture of LC communities.

One suspects that the maps were the real reason for writing this book – nearly two hundred of them (accompanying nearly four hundred articles), all to the same scale (along with a few others at a much smaller scale for worldwide coverage); even the software used for making the maps is fully credited (734). Almost every map plots several languages, making this a unique and valuable reference (the maps are vastly preferable to those in Atlas of Languages 1996, see Daniels 1998). It is of course not so comprehensive as Moseley & Asher 1994, but far easier to use because of the compact format.