This slender, neatly typeset volume contains a selection of the papers presented at an international three-day workshop on creole languages and language acquisition, held at the University of Leiden in 1990. Entitled “The logical problem of language acquisition,” the workshop set out to investigate the acquisition of parts of the grammar by children and adults. The purpose of the Leiden gathering was to bring together linguists from essentially two fields (language acquisition theory and pidgin/creole studies) in order to “solve the ‘logical problem of language acquisition’ from as many perspectives as possible” (p. 6).1 The central issue examined during the workshop was whether the specific circumstances of the genesis of a creole language have implications for theories of language acquisition in general. Conversely, the organizers and participants hoped that their discussions would shed new light on the early history of existing creole languages.

In 1964 a South Indian man doused himself with kerosene and set himself alight, shouting, “Long live Tamil! Down with Hindi!” This act of self-sacrifice (followed by several more) provides the starting point for this long-overdue history of the Tamil language movement. In seeking to explain this extreme devotion to Tamil, Ramaswamy quickly points out that the usual answer of “linguistic nationalism” is inadequate. “Nationalism” is a blunt instrument, honed in the study of modern Europe, and “passions of the tongue do not readily map onto passions of the nation” (5). As a corrective, Ramaswamy sets out to write a “different” history of this extraordinary, possibly unique language movement by introducing the concept of tamilparru ‘devotion to Tamil’.

Preston's Preface identifies a gaping hole in the domain of SLA research: a “relative neglect ... of the insights to be gained from the quantitative study of interlanguage variation” (p. xiv). The book is intended to remedy that defect by providing (a) a clear rationale for the use of quantitative sociolinguistic methods to study interlanguage variation; (b) seven exemplary studies which use multivariate analysis of linguistic variation for this purpose; and (c) a practical, step-by-step manual on how to use VARBRUL computer programs to analyze variable interlanguage data. Readers of this book should come away with a very clear idea of why and when this sort of analysis should be done, and how to use this powerful tool in analyzing their own data.

Pooley sets out in this book to study Chtimi, the drôle de français ‘funny French’ (p. 2) of the Lille area, the northernmost region of France – and to show, through his analysis of two corpora of spontaneous speech, “the transition from patois to accent du Nord” in the speech of the working-class inhabitants of Roubaix and Rouges-Barres. The result, carried out with methodological rigor, is an important addition to the field of French sociolinguistics; it will be welcomed not only by scholars seeking a detailed analysis of the key features of northern Regional French, but also by those interested in ongoing changes in popular French. Pooley is particularly interested in tracing the obsolescence of Chtimi through its convergence with the closely related popular French register; in doing so, he provides a wealth of information about the phonological, morphological, and syntactical features of Chtimi, as used by his sources, and about popular French.

This volume, containing some 30,000 entries, takes its place as one of the most sophisticated and comprehensive dictionaries ever prepared for an American Indian language; indeed, it is among the best dictionaries available for any language of the world, and a model for future lexicographers of “neglected” languages. The editorial team – including Hill, Emory Sekaquaptewa, Mary E. Black, Ekkehart Malotki, and the late Michael Lomatuway'ma – compiled the work in consultation with a large team of elder Hopi speakers from the westernmost Third Mesa (the villages of Oraibi, Kykotsmovi, Hotevilla, Bacavi, and Moencopi). Entries include information on inflection, definitions, examples (often illustrating aspects of Hopi culture), etymologies, and synonymy, as in the following sample entry:

(1) kyàasom|ta (∼tota)vn.p. cook creamed corn. Hakim tùupeptote' mit pay hingsavàwyat hakim poyot akw ang sispayangwu; pu' hak ∼tangwu; kyasmi pamningwu. When they roast sweet corn in the pit oven, they scrape the kernels off the very short ears and cook them by boiling; that is creamed corn. kyàasom-ta [creamed:corn-caus] Syn. kyàasomkwiva.

A prevailing fear of ambiguity, coupled with a global business imperative, has given birth to a new readership for the Japan-book trade. This new market, a large and lucrative one, is for general-interest books targeted at those who read about Japan not because they want to, but because they think they must in order to “succeed.” However, another book focused on Japanese and American communication may still hold the potential to teach us something new and valuable. A recent addition to this burgeoning literature is the book under review. Yamada has a lively writing style, a graceful use of metaphor and stories, and a Tannenesque “linguistics for the masses” formula to lead the reader through a few areas of probable communicative misunderstanding. On the basis of anecdotes, fables, TV dramas, samurai movies, proverbs, and some of her own previously published findings on bank contract meetings, Yamada sets out what she sees as the crucial discrepancies between American and Japanese conversational styles. These are easily summarized with her repeated characterizations of each group: Americans are independent and individualistic, and use explicit language, while Japanese are interdependent and group-oriented, and use implicit language.

The Languages volume has been perhaps the most eagerly awaited of the Smithsonian Institution's monumental revision and updating, over the past three decades, of the Handbook of North American Indians, the original of which was produced by the Smithsonian's Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) in the early years of the twentieth century (Hodge 1907). Linguists and ethnologists alike will find illustrative data on a range of language-related topics, accompanied by contemporary interpretations. Volume editor Goddard is to be congratulated for the scope and detail of this effort to characterize the state of the Americanist linguistic art. The volume consists of an Introduction by Goddard (1–16), a series of what we may call “discursive” articles by several authors, and a set of “Grammatical sketches,” followed by a Bibliography and Index.

Malayalam, a member of the Dravidian family, is the official language of Kerala state in southwest India. Asher is an experienced Dravidianist of Edinburgh University, as well as editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (10 vols., Oxford: Pergamon, 1994); his co-author is a native speaker of Malayalam, and a former professor at a college in Kerala.

It used to be that first-year linguistics students would be exposed to data from a wide variety of languages – in the classic textbooks of Bloomfield 1933, Gleason 1961, or Hockett 1958, and in the workbooks of Gleason 1955 and of Merrifield et al. 1967. We may not have known exactly where Nupe or Sierra Popoluca were spoken, but we knew something of how they operated. We learned about agglutination in Turkish and Swahili; we worked the notorious Nahuatl phonology problem in which Gleason insisted there were no misprints. Non-majors who wanted to learn something of linguistics might be offered a course called “Languages of the world.” In the guise of a survey of exotic peoples, they might be introduced to some of what linguists have discovered about the differences and similarities among languages and to techniques useful in describing them that might also apply to cultures in general.

The Japanese writing system is frequently singled out for the dubious distinction of being the modern world's most complex, and the amount of time and effort that public figures in Japan have spent promoting and resisting script reform in this century seems to have been in direct proportion to the system's complexity. The two books under review are important contributions to the documentation and interpretation of this protracted and acrimonious struggle.

This book is an ambitious attempt to wed a semiotic metatheory with the close analysis of ritual language and ritual exchange on Sumba Island, in eastern Indonesia. Keane explores the paradoxes of ritual formality, which seeks to make social encounters predictable and formulaic but nonetheless faces risks and hazards in performance. At the same time, he examines “the power and value” of the objects exchanged by the Anakalangese people, concluding that “the materiality of objects and the social constraints on circulation prevent even the wealthiest Anakalangese from full mastery over the goods they transact” (24).

This book, an extensively revised version of a 1992 dissertation from the University of Amsterdam, presents a wealth of information about the culture, documented history, and languages of the Canadian Métis – an ethnic group descended from French and other European fur traders and hunters and their Native American wives. The Métis live in several areas in the Canadian West, as well as parts of North Dakota, Montana, and further afield. This group has been a recognized and clearly constituted ethnic entity in the region since at least the mid-19th century. The focus throughout Bakker's book is on the nature and origin of Michif, the unique language that has brought the Métis (especially those who traditionally hunted buffalo and who came from the Red River of Saskatchewan) to the attention of students of intimate language contact. Michif has possibly been in existence as a language since the 1840s (p. 160), although actual attestations of linguistic material date only from the early 1970s.

The past two years have seen the publication of three books on linguistic practices among different Puerto Rican communities in the United States, and Zentella's book is one of the three. The other two are Urciuoli 1996 and Torres 1997. This sudden wealth within a particular disciplinary domain seemingly proves the first part of Gordon Lewis's (1963) pronouncement that Puerto Ricans are among the most researched peoples in the United States; but the sensitive ideological insights that guide Zentella's ethnography and analyses will certainly contribute to undermining the second part of his statement – that they are nonetheless the least understood. The books by Urciuoli and Torres are likewise valuable in this sense; but obviously, they are not under review here. Her documentation of the uses of language among Puerto Ricans in a New York City barrio greatly enhances our understanding of the Puerto Rican experience, as its meaning and place within “mainstream” US society is defined and contested through struggles over linguistic ideologies and practices.

In this book, W&S-E provide an account of the background research and fieldwork for – as well as the results, influences, and applications of – their work (and that of other collaborators) on the dialect of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, particularly on the island of Ocracoke. The reader of this review should keep in mind the readership that W&S-E have in mind: “We attempt to describe the language that is faithful to the detailed patterning of the dialect while making our account readable to the wide range of people who are interested in the speech of Ocracoke” (xii).

This book is an important step in the literature of literacy – both for its rich and multi-faceted information and analyses, and for its approach. It deals with efforts to develop alphabetic literacies in traditionally unwritten languages that were already present in the Americas at the time of the arrival of the Europeans in the 15th century. Three complementary areas of scholarship are concerned: language planning and bilingual education; literacy studies, especially “new literacy” studies, with their emphasis on multiple literacies and their local meaning; and Native American studies, in particular the exploration of Native American ways of knowing. A broad array of case studies is offered in a three-part arrangement: North America (5 papers: Yup'ik [2], Navajo, Hualapai, Cochití); Meso-America (four papers: the CELIAC project in Mexico [2], Nuu Savi, a Mixtec language in Mexico, Mayan in Guatemala); and South America (7 papers: Quechua in Peru [3], bilingual education in Ecuador [2], Quechua in Ecuador and Bolivia, Guaraní in Bolivia). The book has an introduction and conclusion by Hornberger, and an afterword by Brian V. Street.

Urban's book may be regarded, at one level, as an exploration of certain traditional anthropological themes – such as social structure, myth, and ritual – in the context of an Amerindian community in Brazil. What makes the book highly non-traditional, however, is how these themes are worked into a discussion of very basic epistemological and methodological concerns: the nature of ethnographic inquiry, criteria for the truth or correctness of ethnographic claims, and the role played by discourse in organizing cultural experience and shaping the outcome of fieldwork.

In this short monograph, addressed to a general audience of novices in the study of language and society, Boutet takes up the challenge of presenting this scientific field in a concise yet informative manner. She successfully meets the challenge, enhancing her lively discussion of basic concepts with numerous examples drawn from past or current research and from her own observational data. Technical jargon has been avoided as much as possible, and a pleasant layout of the various sections (as well as a good cross-referencing system) contribute to make the subject matter accessible to the reader. The book also contains useful bibliographic references and suggestions for further reading.

The authors of this book were senior figures in the cohort of students who pursued American Indian linguistics under the direction of the late Mary Haas at Berkeley starting in the 1950s and 60s. In 1994, while the present work was being prepared for publication, Miller – the unquestioned dean of Uto-Aztecan linguistic studies – died tragically as a result of a bicycle accident in Mexico. The volume was seen through the press by Silver, an area specialist in Native Californian languages. As it now stands, the book is a fitting reminder of the richness of the “Berkeley tradition” in which the authors were trained; it is also an appropriate memorial to Miller's life and achievements.