What is a native speaker? This question has been taken for granted in linguistics, which has frequently taken as its starting point the monolingual community in which the native speaker is one who speaks the language “from the crib” (Singh, 40) throughout his or her life. In the idealized case, even for sociolinguistics, the native speaker has one native language which s/he speaks fluently: s/he is a rather “sedentary” person who is “uncontaminated” in significant ways by speakers of other languages (Salikoko Mufwene, 114).

In what she terms “an exercise in historical eavesdropping”, Kamensky explores the relationship between speech and society in 17th-century New England. In doing so, she places speech at center stage in the New England experience. Her insightful study floodlights the connections between gender and speech, speech and power, community cohesiveness and community deviance. Early New Englanders, she argues, believed “speech was conduct and conduct was speech” that is, in a culture that remained largely oral, they imbued speech with powers almost as great as those of actual deeds.

Investigators of bilingual language acquisition have underscored the fact that the child growing up with two languages provides us with an ideal natural experiment. First, the bilingual child offers welcome opportunities for disentangling general cognitive and specific linguistic development. Second, the investigator can look at different language policies adopted by individual families and caregivers, compare features of the respective input, and relate these features to the child's emerging language systems and communicative behavior. Lanza's book addresses this second set of issues and provides us with valuable insights concerning what she calls “language socialization” and children's early sensitivity toward the acceptability of their language choice.

Anthropologists have long recognized that Australian aboriginal cultures have a rich repertoire of cognitive achievements, and they have contrasted this richness with the relative impoverishment of their technological repertoire. However, despite the richness of the cognitive repertoire, the anthropological literature contains no overall inventory for any aboriginal cultural group. McKnight's monograph is the first work that covers everything: social structure (including kinship), myth, ritual, dancing, property structure, and biological classification. The quality of the scholarship is very high. At the time of writing, McKnight had worked with the Lardil for 30 years, including 16 field trips, with a total time of residence among the Lardil of more than five years. After completing an MA on West African materials under Darryl Forde, he switched to Australia, where he also worked with the Wik-mungkan and a number of other groups. The present monograph is the first of a projected trilogy; work is under way now on the second volume, a monograph on marriage, sorcery, and violence. In recent years, McKnight has been involved, on behalf of the Lardil, in negotiations with the Australian government for land claims.

Since the inception of Labov's variationist approach to the study of linguistic change, there have been two approaches to phonology: one theoretically motivated, addressing relatively invariant idealizations of language; and another empirically motivated, in which language is taken to be fundamentally variable. Since the time of the controversy over the incorporation of probability into grammar in the Variable Rule (VR) model, these two approaches have largely diverged. Critics have expressed skepticism about probabilistic rules, challenged their psychological reality, and rejected the variationist's methods of aggregating speakers (cf. papers collected by Singh 1996). Variationists have responded with improved methods, more thorough demonstrations of variability, and articulations of the relevance of variation to linguistic change (e.g. Labov 1994). The controversy continues today; and as readers of the present volume will see, it has entered new territory.

Saint Barthélemy (SB) has long remained a linguistic enigma. This islet – home of an indigenous, mostly White population of about 3,000 – is divided into at least three linguistic zones: one whose vernacular is a French-based creole; the second, a northern French (oïl) dialect; and the third, English. Calvet, a leading French sociolinguist, and Chaudenson, an eminent French creolist, have set out to explain how, as a result of social insularity triggered by intertwined geographical and economic factors, an apparently ethnically homogeneous population, established on a 25-sq.-km. isolate, became so linguistically diverse. They also provide a brief comparative description of the French-related varieties used by this population, and an indication of its linguistic attitudes (as reflected by the testimony of teenage members of its two subcommunities).

The purpose of this volume is not only to provide “more delicate and accurate descriptions” (p. 2) of Louisiana French, but also to highlight the variation, origins, and social contexts of French-related varieties in Louisiana. The volume's editor, whose research on French and creole linguistics spans decades (cf. Valdman 1977, 1978, 1983, 1993) has gathered – starting from workshops and annual meetings on regional dialects – an impressive collection of articles on Western Hemisphere French, in order to create a comprehensive overview of the past, present, and future of French in Louisiana. The reader may consider dividing the book into four sections: (a) general issues surrounding endangered languages and minority languages in the US; (b) linguistic sketches of Cajun French (CF) and Louisiana Creole (LC); (c) discussions of sociopolitical events surrounding the language planning and preservation movements; and (d) chapters devoted to other varieties of French that have similarities to CF and LC.

This is an informative and quite stimulating book, which offers a detailed look at the nature of creole genesis with particular emphasis on the emergence of Saramaccan (SM), one of the maroon creoles spoken in Suriname. McWhorter describes himself in the preface as a member of the third generation of creolists – a generation not afraid to challenge the conventional wisdom in the field, or to offer alternative theories. This book has the rather ambitious aim of proposing a “systematic account of creolization which integrates a number of the processes which creolists have identified as contributing the structural form of these languages” (10). In pursuing it, McWhorter re-examines two key areas of SM syntax – serial verb constructions and the copula system – to support his own eclectic view of creole formation. Despite the date of publication, the book is essentially the same as McWhorter's doctoral dissertation, completed in 1993. Hence it is somewhat dated, and omits mention of much recent and current work on creole genesis.

Over the past decade, an increasing number of linguists have been turning their attention toward the plight of endangered languages. We are realizing that most of the small indigenous languages of the world are in great danger of disappearing over the coming century, if they have not already disappeared. Nor are linguists alone in their concern; the media have become interested in the issue, as have international organizations – like UNESCO, the European Union, and even national governments that have in the past been instruments of the demise of indigenous languages. Clearinghouses are being set up (e.g. the International Clearing House for Endangered Languages at Tokyo University), and funds such as the Endangered Languages Fund. Most active in fighting language extinction are members of the affected communities themselves, who are working on their own, or forging new kinds of partnerships with linguists, in an effort to reverse language shift. In the context of these movements, this excellent book is a welcome and crucial resource. The volume gathers together a set of valuable articles by a group including some of the best scholars in linguistics and some of the best native language teachers: Nancy Dorian, Nora and Richard Dauenhauer, Kaia'titahkhe Annette Jacobs, Colette Grinevald, Marianne Mithun, Ken Hale, Christopher Jocks, Anthony Woodbury, Carol Myers-Scotton, and Nikolai Vakhtin. It is a must-read for anyone – native, linguist, teacher, or policy maker – who is involved with issues of language loss, maintenance, or revitalization.

All researchers observe a balance between continuity with prior tradition (so others will know enough to understand and value the work) and innovation (such that only new contributions are generally deemed publishable). This balance can be difficult to recognize at times of disciplinary revolution, when a previously accepted paradigm is rejected in favor of a newer one – the sort of change in assumptions described by Kuhn 1962. At such times, it requires considerable subtlety for the disciplinary historian to unearth the substantial influence of previous research generations, since the rhetoric emphasizes revolution and change to the exclusion of all else. In the present book, Darnell studies one such critical point: the shift to professionalization within anthropology that occurred at the beginning of the 20th century. It is to her credit that she documents substantial continuities between the research conducted in the immediately pre-professional stage by John Wesley Powell and others in the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), and that of Franz Boas and his students, despite decades of rhetoric – from the participants, as well as their students – that have emphasized only the differences. Despite the fact that “oral histories of American anthropology have generally assumed that … professional anthropology in America sprang forth full-blown about 1900 when Boas began teaching at Columbia” (p. 6), Darnell demonstrates that professionalization was a more gradual process.

South Philadelphia can be added to the littered landscape of Jewish geography, in which Chelm, Belz, Odessa, Boiberik, and Brownsville are terrain abandoned by Jews. They are romanticized in folk songs, but they make poor real estate investments. Similarly, Yiddish cultural life may be seen as a landscape of outmoded lifeways. The Yiddish language and its dialects have been cast off, but at the same time they remain cherished in memory. Peltz's ethnography explores Yiddish as it survives among what is left of a Yiddish-speaking community in Philadelphia. The story of Yiddish is one of powerlessness; Peltz takes us to the seemingly marginal Jews, the yidelekh – working-class, elderly women and men who are marginalized as a function of their old age, their accents, and their lack of higher education.

This collection of articles is the first in a projected series on the topic of language names – glottonyms, or occasionally glossonyms. The present volume owes its impetus to a 1994 colloquium organized by the Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique, Université de Bretagne Occidentale. The book offers a reasonable treatment of general issues, but most of the authors treat European, particularly Western European, cases. As the subtitle of the volume indicates, the focus here is claimed to be largely a social one, having to do with the political, ideological, and social aspects of language naming. The book consists of an introduction by the editor, followed by four sections.

For more than a decade, Americanists have been working in the shadow of Greenberg's Language in the Americas (1987) and the hemisphere-wide classification of American Indian languages proposed there. Greenberg's work, based for the most part on naïve comparisons of lexical data with which he was largely unfamiliar, was met with considerable skepticism by scholars familiar with the problems of American linguistic classification. But Greenberg, a senior linguist who is widely recognized as the father of modern linguistic typology, aggressively defended his methods and results, and he made allies among geneticists and archeologists who found that his tripartite classification (Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene, and “Amerind”) dovetailed with some of their own ideas. Moreover, his book was published by a leading university press. Mainly for these reasons – certainly not for its critical acceptance – Language in the Americas has become a standard reference work. It is in most academic libraries in North America, and in many it is given a place of honor on the reference shelf – together with Merritt Ruhlen's Guide to the world's languages, I: Classification (published by the same press, 1987), which, at least for the Americas, does little more than uncritically recapitulate Greenberg.

Treating the least well researched period in the history of English, Richard Bailey's groundbreaking book is an admirable success: wry in its humor, clear in its science, and compelling in its humanity. More than that, it is a sterling achievement of research, a model for all who write about the history of spoken or written English, a benchmark of scope and insight. Bailey's calculations suggest that, in the course of the 19th century, the number of English speakers increased from 26 million to 126 million, helping to make the century the “most transforming” period in the history of English: it was transformed “from merely a language to a valuable property, firmly incorporated into capitalist economies. Far more than at any earlier time, English could be bought and sold. It was even possible to earn one's livelihood by working with it”.

This excellent collection of twelve papers is sure to be of keen interest to Andean scholars from a range of disciplines. Howard-Malverde has succeeded at two difficult tasks: compiling a substantial number of academically outstanding papers and, perhaps a greater challenge for an editor, creating a volume which reads as a coherent whole. The latter feat is even more impressive given the breadth and depth of the contributions and the varied academic backgrounds of the contributors. The volume's authors are scholars of anthropology, linguistics, history, and literature, reflecting the academic traditions of nations both in Europe and in North and South America. All but two papers were originally presented at the 1991 conference, “Textuality in Amerindian cultures,” convened by RHM and William Rowe.

Francophone literature and culture have become the leading area of growth in French studies in the US; thus this broad-ranging critical examination of the notion of francophonie constitutes a timely contribution.

Change of editorship. The present volume of Language in Society (vol. 29, 2000) marks a transition in the editorship of the journal; the newly appointed editor is Jane H. Hill.

From the beginning of 2000, then, all manuscripts submitted for publication, all books offered for review, and all new editorial correspondence should be sent to Prof. Jane H. Hill, Editor, Language in Society, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721.

Can a textbook win the hearts as well as the minds of students? This one tries, and because of the richness of its material, it might could succeed. With copious examples of, and exercises in, the logic of nonstandard English, from Appalachia to Okracoke to African American Vernacular, the authors aim to replace linguistic prejudice with respect, if not admiration, for the varieties of American English that students will encounter.

What makes Russians Russian? Is it a special national character, or their common emotional or intellectual spirit? Ries helps us get rid of these slippery essentialist commonplaces with her interpretative anthropological study of Muscovites' everyday private talk around 1990. Her effort is outstanding in both description and theory: Few have undertaken to describe and analyze Russian (or Eastern European) urban everyday discourse from the anthropological perspective, as she does (though recent macro-studies and studies of public discourse are more numerous). At the same time, she creates and defends a thesis of everyday talk as a vital medium of social value creation and maintenance – as it constructs “Russianness,” in her example.

To understand this book, a little background information helps. I first encountered Ali Mazrui in 1968–70 when I was the first lecturer in linguistics at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda; Mazrui, a member of the political science faculty, was already a famous orator, acknowledged by all as possessing “a golden tongue.” Since then, he has gone on to become probably the most famous African studies professor in the United States; he was the presenter of the nine-part BBC/PBS television series The Africans: A triple heritage, and he is the author of many books and articles on Africa. He has taught at many universities around the world, and is now director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies and Albert Schweitzer Professor in the Humanities at the State University of New York at Binghamton. His junior co-author (a relative?), Alamin M. Mazrui, was trained as a linguist and is an associate professor of Black studies at Ohio State University. Both are native speakers of Swahili from Mombasa, Kenya (they prefer to refer to the language as Kiswahili, with its noun class prefix, as it would be if one were speaking the language itself). Kiswahili, of course, is probably the best-known African language; many people in East Africa and other areas (e.g. the Democratic Republic of Congo) speak it as a second language. Furthermore, it is one of the few indigenous languages with official status in an African nation; it is the official language of Tanzania, and the co-official language in Kenya along with English. However, Kiswahili is spoken natively mainly along the East African coastline and on the offshore islands (e.g. Zanzibar), often by persons with a dual Arabic-African heritage similar to that of the Mazruis.