Soviet Yiddish occupies a special place in Yiddish linguistics. It is different from klal-Yiddish – ‘rule’-Yiddish, or normative Yiddish – in having certain orthographic peculiarities and a quite striking oddness in the spelling of words of Hebrew-Aramaic origin. These differences, which were ideologically driven and enforced by the Soviets, are plain to see and visually startling even to neophyte readers of ordinary Yiddish. The older British spellings gaol, kerb, and tyre for jail, curb, and tire convey something of the effect to the American English speaker.

The foundation of the Ebonics controversy (EC) was laid centuries before its December 1996 debut. The EC was not about the name “Ebonics,” but about a legacy. In the Introduction, Baugh writes: “This text attempts to clarify several of the issues, misconceptions, and educational policies that emerged from the Ebonics controversy while striving to view them within the broader context of the linguistic legacy of American slavery and to address the linguistic prejudices that tend to inhibit improved race relations” (xiii). Within this context, Baugh clarifies how the EC happened, and why.

In this book, MacSwan accounts for code-switching constraints between Spanish and Nahuatl, a Uto-Aztecan language of central Mexico, while testing two main hypotheses: (1) Nothing constrains code-switching apart from the requirements of the mixed grammars; and (2) code-switchers have the same grammatical competence as monolinguals for the languages they use (p. 22).

As this is my first note to the readers of Language in Society, I begin by expressing my gratitude to the former Editor-in-chief, William Bright, for his many years of splendid stewardship of the journal and for his kind help and patience in the changeover. I also want to thank the distinguished members of the Editorial Board, some of whom have seen unexpected extra years added to their terms while I have been getting organized. But mainly I write to explain the format of the present issue, with its four quite long articles and only six book reviews. This does not represent a change in editorial policy in the direction of a de-emphasis of book reviews or in favor of long papers. It does, however, represent a response to two problems. The first is that, while the time from submission to an editorial decision now averages about 4 months (a reasonable interval, considering that it can sometimes take weeks to find referees for an article), the time from acceptance of an article to publication in Language in Society is now at least a year, and often 18 months. I want to try to decrease that interval. The second is that I recently spent six months in Australia. It was impractical to forward books submitted for review from Tucson to Melbourne, so I commissioned only one or two book reviews between June and December 2000. The shift in balance of the present issue permits me to stretch out the book reviews

From the 1930s through the 1970s, the Muskogean languages of the southeastern US were virtually the scholarly preserve of the late Mary R. Haas, and no modern grammars or dictionaries were available for them. In more recent years, it has been a pleasure to witness increasing work in this language family by Pamela Munro at UCLA – and her students, and her students' students – and by Karen Booker and her associates at the University of Kansas. The present volume is the third major Muskogean dictionary to appear in the past few years.

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.

Conversation analysis has opened up a new frontier for both Conversation Analysis (CA) and second-language acquisition (SLA). It is a gutsy and timely book. As a first endeavor of its kind, it ventures to apply an increasingly popular discourse analytic methodology to a field whose research has traditionally been governed by experimental paradigms. It also strikes an impressive balance between theoretical considerations and empirical analyses. The book begins with purely theoretical discussions on the larger issues that govern the two fields, then moves on to incorporate empirical data in illustrating the possibility of connecting them. The theory-to-practice continuum is completed by applying CA to two SLA-related collections of data. In a remarkable way, the author manages to become fully engaged in micro-analytic procedures without for a moment losing sight of the larger pictures that motivated these procedures.

Hong Kong has received much world attention in recent years. After a century and half of colonial occupation, it was returned to China in 1997. Before British rule, it was an unremarkable seaside outpost of Guangzhou (Canton), the premier city in South China. Thus, the speech of its overwhelming majority is called “Cantonese” in English. In fact, Hong Kong and Guangzhou share essentially the same speech, the primary differences being lexical choices.

This very interesting and useful book proposes an interdisciplinary approach to professional talk and its constitutive role in various institutional settings. It aims at reviewing the available literature and at providing theoretical insights and methodological tools for further analyses, thereby building possible bridges between academic research and its practical relevance within institutions.

This volume contains nine chapters offering ethnomethodological contributions to media studies. As such, it can be read as a demonstration of what ethnomethodology can contribute to this field. This raises two questions: First, what is it that ethnomethodology has to offer? And second, how well does the volume succeed in this demonstration?

This is a collection of 19 articles written by educators, policymakers, and linguists addressing the use of Pacific languages in education. The focus is on small island countries, and so Australia is not included. The book, well illustrated and containing many useful maps, is edited by two scholars with extensive research experience in the Pacific. They have grouped the articles around three important themes relevant to local education systems: (a) the roles of vernaculars in formal education; (b) questions of policy, maintenance, and non-governmental programs; and (c) issues, problems, standards, and attitudes. The result is a book that presents a compelling picture of the linguistic situation of various education systems in the Pacific nations. To summarize the situation briefly: Nothing is simple.

To understand prosody in naturally occurring language requires an exceptional constellation of skills. One must have not only expertise in the analysis of pitch patterns and the complex signals that make up our perception of stress, but also a rich and informed perspective on how talk works. Although some phonologists are highly sophisticated in their approaches to prosody, empirical research in this area is both heavily based on laboratory-produced data (when it is empirical in that sense), and highly abstract in its descriptive procedures. For their part, analysts of spoken discourse, though basing their descriptions on naturally occurring language, often lack fundamental expertise in the close analysis of sound production and perception. The authors of Language in time are exceptional in the individual and collective skill they bring to their project. In this carefully crafted volume, Peter Auer, Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen, and Frank Müller offer an empirically grounded and innovative view of the interplay of prosody and action in spoken language use. The volume focuses on the functions of rhythm in spoken interaction, drawing data from English, Italian, and German, and concentrating on “conversational organization and verbal performance” (p. 33). The work provides a counterbalance to the prevailing dualism in linguistic studies, by which language is first and foremost understood as a system separated from time.

This volume is an important contribution to sociolinguistic analysis and critique. It explicitly addresses the challenge of Labov 1982 – made to linguists nearly twenty years ago – to tackle the persistent questions asked by the public: “What is linguistics about? And what is it good for?” Indeed, arguments presented in Labov's article, which appeared in this journal, quickly became the canon for many African American linguists on how to defend working in a field that studied a social and cultural system without talking about its social and cultural implications. Labov provided support for conducting sociolinguistic work when the Black Power movement, and public awareness of social injustice against Black people, were at their height. He also provided an arsenal of arguments to present to linguists on the importance of recognizing the politics and social consequences of our work. Baugh's text is in the spirit of Labov's challenge, and it represents a further demonstration of the ways linguistic research can be used to address social prejudice and injustice.

As indicated by the title, this book steers away from traditional, atheoretical, praxis-oriented frameworks for studying interpreting. Its strength lies in its call for research that describes interpreted events as a means of moving away from prescriptive approaches to the discipline. The book discusses Roy's own application of discourse theory in her analysis of a videotaped interpreted event. The languages represented in that event are American Sign Language (ASL) and English, but the conclusions and recommendations made by the author are equally relevant to both signed and spoken language researchers, interpreters, interpreter trainers, and interpreters in training. Drawing on research in interactional sociolinguistics, Conversation Analysis, and ethnography of communication, Roy provides a rich description and analysis of a 30-minute meeting between a deaf student and a professor at a U.S. university. Through her analysis, Roy challenges the belief that interpreters serve as a conduit providing direct interaction between primary interlocutors.

This book is something we've needed for a long time. It lays out what everyone – the public as well as professionals in all fields – should understand about dialects and dialect differences in our increasingly diverse encounters. It is written with technical sophistication, wise judgment, and a clear style, with rich examples that make it accessible to students and clinicians (and maybe even marketable as a trade book). LiS readers may learn little new to them, but they can assign this book with confidence to any class, and they can read it profitably as a model of how to talk about this controversial topic to non-linguists. Given this kind of book – non-controversial to linguists themselves – it seems most useful for a review to indicate the scope of the eight chapters and Appendix.

As the title suggests, the collection under review focuses on two related issues in current linguistic research: language change – with emphasis on diachronic syntax – and what seems to be the more elusive question of “language creation” as instantiated in Creole genesis. The central empirical domain of the latter inquiry, creolization, constitutes the link between the contributions, which are all written against a coherent, broadly generative theoretical background.

In the continuing debate on the origins of creole languages, Lefebvre has long taken a strong stance in favor of an essential contribution of the West African substratum to the grammatical makeup of Haitian Creole; thus, she opposes both a universalist account along the lines of Derek Bickerton's bioprogram (e.g. 1984), and Robert Chaudenson's superstratist approach (e.g. 1992). Lefebvre's present book summarizes the main findings of two decades of research by herself and others (such as John Lumsden and Anne-Marie Brousseau) through various projects carried out at the Université du Québec à Montréal. The overall aim of this enterprise has been to test the hypothesis that adult speakers of the substratum languages, in creating a new creole language, use the properties of their native lexicons as well as the parametric values and semantic interpretation rules of their native grammars (9). In order to test this hypothesis, Haitian Creole is compared, on the one hand, with its superstratum or lexifier language, French, and on the other hand, with Fongbe (or Fon, belonging to the Gbe cluster of Kwa languages), as a representative of the substratum. Most of the book consists of the presentation of such three-way comparisons in regard to nominal structure (Chap. 4), the marking of tense, mood, and aspect (Chap. 5), pronouns (Chap. 6), clausal operators and the structure of the clause (Chaps. 7–8), the properties of verbs (Chap. 9), derivational affixes (Chap. 10), compounds (Chap. 11), and parametric options (Chap. 12). In all these areas, striking similarities between Haitian and Fongbe are revealed.

Lexical acculturation has received moderate attention through the years, but largely from the perspective of acculturative studies of individual languages, or from that of the incorporation of loans from one specific language into another. A few authors have attempted comparative studies of patterns across regional areas or several languages, but rarely on the scale represented by Brown's study. In this volume, he looks at 77 concepts and items of acculturation from European sources in 292 Native American languages, covering the whole of the New World. But this work is more than a catalog of these items in the native languages: it is also a thorough discussion and analysis of the apparent processes and principles by which such transfers take place. Brown hopes that, through such massive comparisons and analyses, the basic principles and processes of linguistic acculturation will become better understood and thereby take on some predictive value in specific situations.

The data that underlie Anneli Sarhimaa's excellent study were gathered between 1989 and 1992, under restrictive field circumstances. Visits to Karelia required what the author terms “intricate co-operation with academic and public authorities in Russia” (p. 76), and the duration of any stay was limited to a few weeks. From her home base in Finland, she made short visits to three Central Karelian villages in the summers of 1989 and 1991, working with additional Central Karelian speakers resident in the capital city of Karelia in the winters of 1990 and 1991; in 1992, a two-week trip allowed her to work in nine Tver Karelian villages in central Russia. That these compressed visits produced 30-some hours of taped interviews and 31 sets of translation-task data (15 Central Karelian, 16 Tver Karelian) does credit to her careful advance planning; the frankness with which she points to limitations in the resulting data does equal credit to her scholarly scrupulousness.

Poplack and other contributors to this important volume are to be commended for an exceptionally well crafted book, with a succession of groundbreaking studies of African American English (AAE). Although this work will undoubtedly add fuel to the flames of historical linguistic controversy that continue to swirl around African Americans, Poplack and her colleagues go far to advance hypotheses and analyses that argue in favor of the English origins of African American Vernacular English (AAVE).