Aneta Pavlenko & Adrian Blackledge (eds.), Negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2004. Pp. 312. Hb $44.95.

This is one of the best books I have read this year. The topic is up to date and relevant for many contexts. Each author contributes to the originality of this edited book. The editors, Pavlenko & Blackledge, have done a wonderful job in putting together a series of texts that demonstrate how negotiation of identities is embedded within larger socioeconomic, sociohistoric and sociopolitical contexts. In order to situate their own framework, the editors start by examining different approaches to the negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts. The sociopsychological approach examines the negotiation of identities in second language learning and language use. However, this approach treats learning trajectories as linear and unidirectional, with little acknowledgment of the fact that learning language and identity building are more complex. Interactional sociolinguistics focuses on the negotiation of identities via code-switching and language choice. This approach sees social identities as more fluid and constructed through linguistic and social interaction. However, even though much sociolinguistic research examines the negotiation of languages choices and identities in multilingual contexts, Pavlenko & Blackledge claim that few have tried to theorize it. In this book, they propose a poststructuralist and critical theory approach to negotiation of identities. Based on the work of Gal 1989, Heller 1988, 1992, 1995a, 1995b, and Woolard 1985, 1989, 1998, the editors argue that language choice in multilingual contexts is embedded in larger social, political, economic, and cultural systems. Their interest is in how languages are used to legitimize, challenge and negotiate specific identities, and to open new identity options for groups and individuals who are subjugated. Their framework combines aspects of the social constructionist approach, which focuses on discursive construction of identities, and the poststructuralist emphasis on power relations. The editors explain in detail what they mean by identities embedded within power relations with the work of Bourdieu. They also focus on identity narratives that reconstruct the links among past, present, and future, and they impose coherence where it was missing.

Sociolinguistic approaches to social justice tend to treat the use of interpreters or translators as a remedy to linguistic inequality in multilingual institutional settings. This article challenges this assumption by showing how translation can instead contribute to inequality and discrimination. Drawing on studies of face-to-face interpreting in judicial contexts and of written translation in linguistic landscapes, it explores inequalities found in habitual practices of professional interpreters and in the use of machine translation. It shows how language ideologies about multilingualism motivate translation practices that systematically restrict the participation of speakers of subordinated languages, or that stereotype them as deviant when addressed solely by prohibitions and warnings, a practice I call ‘punitive multilingualism’. The article thus argues that sociolinguistic studies of multilingualism should pay closer attention to translation practices within a wider context of language contact and in relation to phenomena such as translanguaging, mock languages, or language shift. (Translation, interpreting, justice, linguistic landscape, discrimination)*

This is the first textbook on metaphor to appear after the cognitive linguistic revolution of metaphorical research launched two decades ago by Lakoff & Johnson with their pioneering work, Metaphors we live by. Much scholarship has since been devoted to this paradigm of research. Twenty years have passed, and Kövecses takes this as a good time to summarize the development of the field. Writing a textbook on metaphor certainly reflects the maturation of the study of metaphor within the cognitive linguistic tradition. Targeted readers are undergraduate and graduate students with interests in metaphor and cognitive linguistics. Experienced researchers may also find this book helpful in motivating new ideas.

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).

China's program of language modernization has been as successful as that of any other nation, yet until Chen's book, we have not had a readable and comprehensive discussion of its reforms. Literacy has risen from about 10% in 1949 to around 80% today. Spoken Chinese dialects, from Cantonese through Hakka to Mandarin, vary as much as do the Germanic languages English, German, and Swedish; so it is a major achievement that 90% of Chinese people can now understand Standard Mandarin, up from 40% in the 1950s (p. 8). The current reforms have roots deep in the 19th century, but Chen discusses how early visions of reform became successful only in the past few decades. An unusual virtue of this compact volume is that it discusses language reforms throughout Greater China – not only in the People's Republic, including Hong Kong, but in Taiwan and Singapore as well.

The nonuse of available slang terms for cash among British bank and building society cashiers is noted and an explanation sought in the field of social control. The possible relevance of the Whorfian hypothesis is explored, and it is suggested that the in-house terms discussed have social and psychological functions in addition to the representational. (Financial terminology, social control, language functions, Whorfian hypothesis).