This article analyzes a set of handwritten documents produced by a Burundese asylum seeker in Belgium. The documents are instances of “grassroots writing”: their authorship is collective, and they display considerable problems with “remembering.” They are also rather typical text-artifacts of globalization processes, in which literacy products from one part of the world meet literacy expectations from another part. Two general points are derived from the analysis. (i) The function of documents such as these is not “reading,” but rather a complex of reading, viewing, and decoding. The documents are at least partially visual bearers of information. Such functions need to be investigated ethnographically. (ii) The reason for this is the fact that the production and reception of such documents has to be set against the background of widely different economies of literacy. Consequently, the differences between text production and text reception are grounded in worldwide patterns of inequality. This casts doubt on a number of popular theses about the nature of contemporary societies and the role of discourse in late modernity.I was able to write this article in the excellent, generous research environment offered to me by the Department of Anthropology of the University of Chicago in the winter quarter of 2003. A preliminary version was presented at the African Studies Workshop, University of Chicago, February 2003. I am grateful to participants of that workshop as well as to Jane Hill and an anonymous reviewer for very useful comments. Research for this article benefited from a personal research grant from the National Science Foundation-Flanders (FWO-V), Belgium.

A quantitative/interpretative approach to the comparative linguistic analysis of media texts is proposed and applied to a contrastive analysis of texts from the English-language China Daily and the UK Times to look for evidence of differences in what Labov calls “evaluation.” These differences are then correlated to differences in the roles played by the media in Britain and China in their respective societies. The aim is to demonstrate that, despite reservations related to the Chinese texts not being written in the journalists' native language, a direct linguistic comparison of British media texts with Chinese media texts written in English can yield valuable insights into the workings of the Chinese media that supplement nonlinguistic studies.

This article attempts to align a familiar task of classroom teaching, eliciting from students correct answers about their lessons, with a major organizational domain in studies of natural conversation, that of conversational repair. Numerous studies have analyzed correction sequences in classroom discourse, and our discussion pays special attention to McHoul's (1990) treatment of “repair in classroom talk.” McHoul directly measures the findings on repair in studies of natural conversation to the regularities of correction sequences in classroom lessons. It is argued, contra McHoul, that repair is a different, and prior, order of discursive work, and one that premises the very possibility of classroom correction. Further, the difference may have wider relevance for understanding repair and correction as “co-operating” organizations of talk-in-interaction more generally.

Since linguistic and anthropological study of sign languages began in the 1960s, most research has focused on national sign languages, with scant attention paid to indigenous and original sign languages. Vulnerable to extinction, the latter varieties can expand our understanding of language universals, language typologies, historical comparative linguistics, and other areas. Using Thailand as a case study and drawing on three examples – a rare phonological form, basic color terminology, and baby talk/motherese – from Ban Khor Sign Language, an indigenous signed code, this article describes the problem of benign neglect of sign languages in current discussions of language endangerment and argues for the importance of expanding such discussions to include codes expressed in the manual-visual channel.The linguistic field research upon which this article is based was funded by the Endangered Language Fund, the Explorers Club, IIE Fulbright, Sign Language Research Inc., the Thai-U.S. Educational Foundation, the UCLA Department of Anthropology, the UCLA Office of International Studies and Overseas Programs, the UCLA Wagatsuma Memorial Fund, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. I wish to thank the following individuals and groups for their assistance in various phases of the project: Alexis Altounian, Poonpit Amatyakul, Jean Ann, Wendy Belcher, Ursula Bellugi, Steve Bickler, Ken Kamler, Peter Ladefoged, Tuanvu Le, Chettah Madminggao, Nutjaree Madminggao, Marina McIntire, Carmella Moore, Pam Munro, Carol Padden, Diana Pash, Nilawan Pitipat, Claire Ramsey, Chip Reilly, Olga Solomon, Kelly Stack, Laura Sterponi, Viphavee Vongpumivitch, and Akira Yamamoto. Special thanks belong to Vien Champa, Lahsee Khammee, Jintala Anuyahong, Anucha Ratanasint, Khwanta Sukhwan, Nipha Sukhwan, Phaiwan Sukhwan, Kampol Suwanarat, Thanu Wongchai, James C. Woodward, the Ratchasuda Foundation, the National Association of the Deaf in Thailand, and, of course, the community of Ban Khor.

This is the eleventh volume in the Blackwell series “Handbooks in Linguistics.” Of the previous ten, one was devoted to general sociolinguistics (Coulmas 1997), making this the first in the series to deal with a specific branch of sociolinguistics. For many scholars, variation theory (including the study of change in progress) is the heartland of sociolinguistics, though not everyone would go as far as Chambers 2003 in equating sociolinguistic theory with variation theory alone. As the earlier Blackwell handbook suggests, the field of sociolinguistics is broader than variation theory per se. However, considering the richness of the handbook under review, one can understand why variation theory should hold the high ground in sociolinguistics. The handbook comprises 29 chapters, divided into five sections: methodologies, linguistic structure, social factors, contact, and language and societies.

Widely impugned by an uninformed public – and even by many of those who practice it – with such derogatory terms as “Spanglish” or “Chinglish,” or “Pocho” in Spanish, codeswitching (CS) has emerged from marginal obscurity to become a major topic of interest among linguists of a wide variety of persuasions in the past 30 years. Weinreich (1953) famously denied that a switch between languages within a sentence was possible; the MLA bibliography now lists 900 titles on the subject, half of which have appeared since 1995. The present volume – the third edited by the indefatigable Rodolfo Jacobson, a pioneer in the field since the 1970s – reflects both this growth and the increasing breadth of interest that has occurred along with increasing attention to bilingualism generally in its many aspects and implications.

The title of this edited volume leads one to expect a timely contribution to the literature on language socialization, which has become increasingly concerned with bilingual and multilingual settings over the past decade or so. Some readers with general interests in bilingual and multilingual situations, or with special interests in education in such settings, may find this collection worthwhile. Those with a particular interest in language socialization, however, will be disappointed – and perhaps irritated to have been misled by the title. The volume's 16 chapters present a broad variety of interesting case studies, but very few among them can accurately be characterized as language socialization studies.

The question of “how second languages are learned” (Gass & Selinker 1994:1) is central to second language acquisition (SLA) research; however, although a number of longitudinal studies have been carried out examining second language (L2) grammatical development, very little attention has been devoted to L2 learners' development of pragmatic competence over time. As Achiba points out, the majority of previous studies on L2 (or interlanguage) pragmatics have observed the single-moment pragmatic realization of a group of L2 learners with similar proficiency levels and compared it with that of native speakers or L2 learners with different proficiency levels or first language (L1) backgrounds. The current paucity of knowledge regarding the developmental aspect of L2 pragmatic competence has led to calls for detailed longitudinal interlanguage pragmatic studies (cf. Kasper & Schmidt 1996, Kasper & Rose 1999). Achiba's study, which carefully observes the pragmatic development in English requestive realization of a seven-year-old Japanese girl over a period of 17 months, certainly meets these essential needs.

Recent years have seen several general introductions to the study of endangered languages, aimed primarily at readers with no special training in linguistics. This is true of Dalby's book as well, and he succeeds in providing the general public with a highly readable account of a current and important linguistic topic.

As I reflect on what is distinctive about this book, the word “seamless” comes to mind. Having experienced my share of multi-authored “readers,” pieced together around a broad subject representing diverse and sometimes conflicting, even contradictory, approaches, I find it refreshing to encounter an anthology that succeeds in introducing major questions in which leading scholars are currently engaged, and presenting them in sufficient detail and sophistication to serve as an invitation to join in the work.

Publications received.

In this Editor's Note I am delighted to announce the appointment of a new editor-in-chief of Language in Society, Barbara Johnstone of Carnegie Mellon University. Professor Johnstone has for a number of years been a member of the Editorial Board of this journal, and readers will all know her distinguished and varied body of sociolinguistic work. Professor Johnstone will begin receiving manuscripts, books for review, and other communications beginning January 1, 2005.