Detailed analysis of transcripts is a time-honored practice among linguistic ethnographers. In contemporary research, however, interactions among global forces distant from ethnographic sites are critical for analysis and explanation, as is the fact that multiple sites must be covered. Ethnographers' interests, pragmatic relevance, and personal deixis militate against the ability of site-specific talk to serve as raw material for construction of the representations of those distant global forces. In this article, local discourse, as manifested in ethnographic oral-history interviews, is viewed first as a test of the impact of those global forces. Second, the talk is a construction that can be explained in terms of those forces' linkage with global representations. Finally, the concept “fractal” is suggested as a possible way to show such links.NOTE: Support by NIH/NIDA grant no. DA-10736 is gratefully acknowledged.

Unlike class or ethnicity, gender-based differences are assumed to result from social difference, not distance, yet across multiple societies, researchers find that gender separation is practiced to varying degrees. Such separation creates distance. Preference for same-gender affiliations emerges around age three, peaks in middle childhood, and lessens during the teen years, yet persists in the workplace and later life. Though reasons for this are many, Thorne (1993:51) identified one finding in these terms: “Where age separation is present, gender separation is more likely to occur.” Because age segregation varies with stage of life, one may predict that gender segregation would wax and wane across the lifespan. This study investigates this prediction with three sociolinguistic variables of Puerto Rican Spanish. In turn, it explores the prediction across other varieties of Spanish, German, and English, focusing on variables that are stable, undergoing change, or in the end stage of loss.I want to send very special muchísimas gracias to Miriam Meyerhoff and William Labov for critical, insightful, and engaged readings of an earlier version of this research. Over the past two years, I have presented portions of this research at various conferences. In these contexts, on more than one occasion, Greg Guy, Gillian Sankoff, and Shahrzad Mahootian have provided both critical and supportive comments. I admire and love all these people. Finally, I thank Jane Hill and the two reviewers whose very useful comments called for clarification and qualification. I appreciate their attention very much. None of these individuals is responsible for shortcomings in the research. I hope any shortcomings here will stimulate long-term research elsewhere. Besos a Diana González-Cameron, mi esposa.

In Dominica, rural adults forbid children from speaking Patwa (a French-lexicon creole) in favor of acquiring English (the official language), contributing to a rapid language shift in most villages. However, adults value Patwa for a range of expressive functions and frequently code-switch around and to children. Children increasingly use English but employ Patwa for some functions during peer play when away from adults. This study examines how, despite possible sanctions, children use Patwa to enact particular adult roles during peer play, and what this signifies about their knowledge of role- and place-appropriate language use. Critically, they draw on their verbal resources and physically embodied social action to create imaginary play spaces both organized by and appropriate for Patwa. The examination of children's social worlds provides a more nuanced picture of language shift – and potential maintenance – than observing only adult-adult or adult-child interaction.An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2002 AAA Annual Meeting in New Orleans in a session organized by Marjorie Goodwin and Lourdes de León, “Children socializing children through language: New perspectives on agency, play, and identities.” I thank them for organizing this exciting and timely panel, and for their comments on my paper. I also thank Bambi Schieffelin, Ana Celia Zentella, Tamar Kremer-Sadlik, Carolina Izquierdo, Jane Hill, and two anonymous reviewers for Language in Society for their insightful comments. I am grateful to several organizations which funded the research: the U.S. Department of Education (Fulbright-Hays), the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the National Science Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. My deepest thanks go to the Dominican children and their families who generously opened their lives to me. I alone take responsibility for any shortcomings here.

This article analyzes the connections between the oral genres displayed by Gitano (Spanish Gypsy) children and adults during religious instruction classes at an Evangelist church and the writings produced by Gitano children in an after-school computer program in the same community. Results are discussed in relation to two strands of received assumptions regarding Gypsy culture and recent theoretical insights in the study of literacy and discourse. On one hand, previous portraits of Gitano culture as exclusively oral need to be revised, in line with a more social and situated perspective on literacy. On the other, the results are a basis for critical examination of dominant explanations regarding the educational failure of Gitano children, an argument that highlights the importance of engaging intratextual linguistic analysis with discussions of the social and institutional orders.We first thank the research participants for their warm welcome to the different sites that are part of this study. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments. This study began when David Poveda worked in the School of Education and Humanities of the University of Castilla-La Mancha, where Ana Cano and Manuel Palomares-Valera completed their training. The research project was funded by the University of Castilla-La Mancha through an internal research grant (Principal Investigator: Beatriz Martín).

A review of A. Suresh Canagarajah, A geopolitics of academic writing. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. Pp. x, 332. Pb. $27.95.

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.

agency, bricolage, deconstructionism, demystification, demythologization, difference, discursively constructed subject positions, duality of structure, essentialism, anti-essentialism, hybridity, ideology, intertextuality

What do these terms from the discipline of cultural studies mean? Do they have any relevance to the study of language and identity? If these are questions you have found yourself pondering, then Cultural studies and discourse analysis (CSDA) is a book you should read. This work is a productive collaboration between a cultural studies scholar (Barker) and a critical discourse analyst (Galasinski) who hope to “forge a useful interdisciplinary dialogue” (1). Although their book is written with the specific aim of showing cultural studies (CS) scholars how critical discourse analysis (CDA) can be used as an analytical tool in investigating identities, for sociolinguists it is also a good introduction to the way identity is theorized in CS. The identities analyzed in the data-based chapters are masculinity (chap. 4), ethnicity and nationality (chap. 5), and masculinity together with ethnicity (chap. 6).

Deuchar & Quay's Bilingual acquisition addresses theoretical issues both of language acquisition in general and of specifically bilingual acquisition through an examination of a case study involving one child's acquisition of English and Spanish in England. Regarding the first issue, the authors attempt to answer questions of phonological differentiation based on acoustic evidence, lexical differentiation in relation to the idea that children avoid lexical synonymy in early stages of language acquisition, and lexical categorization of two-word utterances and the emergence of language choices. Regarding the second issue, they are concerned with the question of whether children possess one or two language systems, and they explore the criteria involved in making such a distinction. Finally, they investigate the factors of the language situation that influence a child's language choice.

The title of Neil Smith's book (Language, bananas and bonobos) suggested to me a book focusing on the issue of nonhuman primate language, and the title attracted me to the book for this reason. While Smith deals with that issue in one chapter, the range of issues explored in this book is much wider than I expected, which made it a more interesting read for me. Smith suggests an audience of non-linguists, and I agree that the book would make an interesting excursion for an academically minded reader with only a passing knowledge of linguistics. I also think there are many linguists who would find the book a catalyst for debate and reexamination of linguistic theory and practice.

The thesis advocated by Wexler in this book challenges traditional views of the makeup and genesis of Yiddish and Modern Hebrew. Traditional views assumed that “Yiddish was either a ‘deformation’ or a ‘creative Jewish outgrowth’ of High German, with attrition of Germanisms and acquisition of Slavicisms resulting from prolonged contact with the Slavic languages, while all historical attestations of Hebrew were regarded blindly as instantiations of Classical Semitic Hebrew” (3). Wexler's counter-proposal is twofold: On the one hand, Yiddish is Upper Sorbian relexified (in the 12th century) on the basis of High German phonetic strings, and Kiev-Polessian relexified on the basis of Yiddish and German (15th century); in this view, Yiddish is typologically a Slavic language with a German lexicon. On the other hand, Modern Hebrew is Yiddish relexified on the basis of Classical Hebrew phonetic strings; in this view, Modern Hebrew is typologically Slavic, like Yiddish, with a Classical Hebrew lexicon; hence, it is not genetically related to Old Semitic Hebrew. The aim of the book is to document this twofold proposal.

This is a very beautiful and useful book. It gives a lot of information which leads to a better knowledge of a linguistic area of major interest to typologists, sociolinguists, ethnolinguists, creolists, and all kind of theoreticians, but nevertheless largely underestimated in this respect. At the same time, the authors manage to avoid excessively technical references and terminology, so that beyond the linguistic point of view, the layman as well as the specialist should be able to understand what a country like Suriname, with its complex history and population, can bring to a better understanding of human societies in general.

Publications received

This note reminds authors that by the time you receive this issue, you should be sending manuscripts and inquiries to the new editor, Barbara Johnstone