This statement is an opening point for the discussion on the effects of the dominance of English as a language of science on other languages and speech communities. The global search for a common auxiliary language that allows unprecedented possibilities for international cooperation, and the resulting prevalence and dominance of English in science, vary in kind and degree, as well as in effects, across language communities and countries. The volume under review is an outstanding one with respect to both thematic diversity and depth of analysis in most of its essays. Since Fishman et al. 1977 edited the first collection of essays on the spread of English, numerous valuable books on the status of English as a global language have been published (Flaitz 1988, Doyle 1989, Kachru 1992, Pennycook 1994, Hartmann 1996, Fishman et al. 1996, Crystal 1997, Ryan & Zuber-Skerritt 1999), but there is no doubt that Ulrich Ammon has edited an extremely innovative and insightful volume.

The language of a speech community can only act as an identity marker for all of its speakers if linguistic norms are widely shared and if a minimal number of language varieties are spoken. This article examines briefly how a linguistic norm came to serve the whole of Iceland and how a situation of relative linguistic homogeneity was maintained for centuries. Sociolinguistic theory tells us that the speech community that we can reconstruct for early Iceland should lead to the establishment and maintenance of local norms. However, Iceland, arguably monodialectal, was certainly characterized by long-term linguistic homogeneity and remained a society where nucleated settlements barely formed over a thousand-year period. Scholars have argued that a mixture of dialects leveled shortly after the settlement of Iceland in the ninth century (Settlement). Studies show that dialect leveling requires dialect mixing, the convergence of people on one place, and sustained linguistic contact between the speakers. The settlement pattern of Iceland is indicative of population divergence (not convergence) and there is limited evidence of sustained contact. It is therefore proposed that the dialect leveling might be linked instead with significant population movements and social upheaval in mainland Scandinavia in the immediate pre-Viking period. The variety of Norse that was taken westward across the Atlantic might itself already have been the result of several earlier stages of mixing and koineization. It is only by combining linguistic, historical, and archaeological knowledge that this problem of how one linguistic norm came to serve the whole of Iceland can be understood.

Florian Coulmas, Sociolinguistics: The study of speakers' choices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. 263. Pb $29.99.

In his new textbook, Coulmas provides readers an easy introduction to sociolinguistics, using speaker choice as the central notion for discussion. In a comfortable conversational style, the author slowly introduces topics, using common examples to demonstrate how sociolinguists think about language use. He provides summaries of findings of key sociolinguistic studies that illustrate ideas without overloading readers with unnecessary and cumbersome details of those studies. The book is accessible for beginning sociolinguistics students and is equally engaging for those already familiar with sociolinguistic concepts, largely because the author uses such interesting and global research to illustrate ideas.

Sociolinguistic research has begun to critique the generalised view of cosmopolitanism as indexed by the use of global and non-local languages and urge us to explore its variety and complexity as situated and dialogical practices. This article answers this call by examining how cosmopolitanism is localised in place talk. Drawing from a larger ethnographic study of language, space, and cosmopolitanism in Shanghai, the analysis focuses on how participants evoke, compare, and evaluate the semiotic landscapes of this Chinese megalopolis. While competing notions of cosmopolitanism emerge during the research interviews, stances taken towards them also perform divergent relationships to the city. This article thus demonstrates how, instead of being a binary opposition, cosmopolitan landscape is discursively reappropriated for the construction of local identities. It contributes to our understanding of how cosmopolitanism is reterritorialised in urban space. (Cosmopolitanism, semiotic landscape, stance, place talk, place-identity, Shanghai)*

This article explores how modes of listening and ideologies of democratic action are intertwined, through the example of a multicultural neighborhood in Oslo, Norway. While much work on language and democracy focuses on speakers, this article instead interrogates how a government listens to citizens, and how different conceptualizations of what listening is index different understandings of democratic action. While the Oslo municipality sees listening as a form of legitimation for governmental policymaking, local residents try to create a more open form of listening, which they see to be a better way of addressing the needs of a more diverse citizenry. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with municipal employees, neighborhood organizations, and residents, the analysis focuses on the participation frameworks and interactional genres that my interlocutors take to be instances of democratic listening, and how listening practices are intertwined with imaginations of a more inclusive future. (Listening, democracy, participatory politics, Norway)*

Lisa J. Green, African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 285 pp. Pb $31.99.

When I first saw Cambridge University Press's announcement of Lisa Green's book, I was quite excited, because a systematic, comprehensive introductory book on African American English had been lacking in the field for quite a while. But now one is available and – to start with my overall impression – it is very good. In what follows I survey the book's contents as well as offer critical assessment of its goals and how they are achieved.

It is unusual for a collection of articles to be as interesting and valuable (while simultaneously diverse) as are the articles assembled here. The papers in this excellent collection reflect the dramatic change that language and gender research has undergone in the past decade, and as such they provide an extremely useful source for anyone seeking a fresh view of the research in this field.

Philip Glenn, Laughter in interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xi, 190, Hb $75.00.

Drawing on extant research in conversation analysis (CA) and other fields, Glenn's entry in the “Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics” series is both an excellent introduction to CA for those outside the field and an interesting exploration of the social phenomenon of laughter. The first chapter gives a general survey of the research, which has often focused on the physicality of laughter and its relation to humor. Ultimately, however, the chapter suggests a function of laughter beyond expressing amusement: affiliation with co-participants in social interaction. In chap. 2, Glenn provides a helpful outline of CA. He emphasizes CA's focus on participants' perspectives and provides a cogent explanation for CA's meticulous transcription conventions with the example of silences, marked on CA transcripts in tenths of seconds. To leave them out, he argues, would be to assume from the beginning that silences in talk mean nothing (p. 37) – an idea that most competent talkers, let alone CA researchers, would reject out of hand.

In response to a crescendo of public and scholarly interest, over the last two decades there has been a noticeable and mostly welcome surge in publications that focus on language documentation, conservation, and revitalization. Early and high impact contributions in Hale et al. (1992) included a now seminal article by Michael Krauss which called for urgent action to prevent linguistics from going down in history as the ‘only science that presided obliviously over the disappearance of 90% of the very field to which it is dedicated’ (Krauss 1992:10). There then followed a discussion on the topic by Ladefoged (1992) and a prompt reply by Dorian (1993) that situated the issue of language endangerment as one deserving of sustained academic attention. Alongside swelling bookshelves that speak to the urgency of this work, major research programs funded by private philanthropic organizations and research councils were also being established at this time. The Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL) was founded in 1995, followed a year later by the Endangered Language Fund (ELF). With the establishment of the Dokumentation Bedrohter Sprachen program (DoBeS) in 2000, the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project (HRELP) in 2002, and the Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) program funded by the US government in 2005, the last two decades bear witness to a steady increase in support, funding, and visibility for the documentation and preservation of endangered languages.

This study investigates the organization of conversational interaction via push-to-talk mobile radios. Operating like long-range walkie-talkies, the mobile radios mediate a remote state of incipient talk; at the push of a button, speakers can initiate, engage, disengage, and reengage turn-by-turn talk. Eight friends used the mobile radios for one week; 50 of their conversational exchanges were analyzed using conversation analytic methods. The findings describe the contour of their conversational exchanges: how turn-by-turn talk is engaged, sustained, and disengaged. Similar to a continuing state of incipient talk in copresence, opening and closing sequences are rare. Instead, speakers engage turn-by-turn talk by immediately launching the purpose of the call. Speakers disengage turn-by-turn talk by orienting to the relevance of a lapse at sequence completion. Once engaged, the mobile radio system imposes silence between speakers' turns at talk, giving them a resource for managing a remote conversation amid ongoing copresent activities.We are grateful to Mimi and her friends for making it possible to collect this data. We also thank Jim Thornton, Marilyn Whalen, Paul Drew, Bob Moore and Luke Plurkowski for their helpful insights.