Braj Kachru, Asian Englishes: Beyond the canon. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005. Pp xxiv, 333. Pb. $27.95.>

Yamuna Kachru & Cecil Nelson, World Englishes in Asian contexts. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006. Pp. xxiv, 412. Pb. $32.50.

Rana Rubdy & Mario Saraceni (eds.) English in the world: Global rules, global roles. London: Continuum, 2006. 218 pp. Pb. £30.00.

With the growth of Asia's manufacturing and service industries, the prediction that China and India, respectively, will have the first and third largest global economies within 30 years, a population that comprises over 50% of the world's people, and massive English language programs throughout the region, it is no surprise that the role of English in Asia has become a major concern. At a recent (2006) Asia TEFL conference in Japan, the notions of Asian English(es), along with Asian methodologies and Asian knowledge, were topics of considerable discussion. The size and diversity of Asia, however, makes it a very difficult entity to define: The Asia TEFL conference included delegates from Israel and Iran, and two of the books under review here, Braj Kachru's Asian Englishes: Beyond the canon (AEBC) and Yamuna Kachru & Cecil Nelson's World Englishes in Asian contexts (WEAC), include (with identical maps) Australia and New Zealand. In some ways, the idea of Asia is defined by what it is not: Europe and North America. It is also not, of course, South America or Africa, though with WEAC containing a chapter on African Englishes (as well as African American Vernacular English, or AAVE), it seems as if they might be allowed in. It is clear nevertheless that various notions of Asia – as an economic zone, as a cultural entity, and as a user of a type or types of English – are widely used. We need to take the notion of Asia and Asian English(es) seriously, if only to try to understand what is meant by Braj Kachru's explanation that AEBC is “essentially about the Asianness in Asian Englishes and their gradual, yet marked, distinctiveness” (p. xv).

Aneta Pavlenko, Emotions and multilingualism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xiv, 304.

As applied linguists turn their attention to the relationship among language, culture, and identity in second language acquisition (SLA) (e.g., Norton 2000; Kramsch 2003a, 2003c), the area of research called “affective factors in SLA” has gained in prominence, particularly with regard to bilingual individuals – according to Pavlenko's definition in Emotions and multilingualism, “speakers who use two or more languages or dialects in their everyday lives” (p. 6). In the past 10 years, Aneta Pavlenko has singlehandedly put emotions at the center of the language learning enterprise and has given a heart to SLA processes that are usually studied exclusively from the cognitive or the social perspective. This book pulls much of her recent work together and embeds it in a large programmatic, state-of-the-art discussion of the emotional dimensions of bilingualism. It also makes an eloquent case for relinquishing the current monolingual bias in linguistics and for studying language from the perspective of the multicompetent individual who speaks more than one language across multiple cultural contexts in everyday life. As such, it is passionate, ambitious, at times personal and autobiographical, but thoroughly researched and rigorously argued, a book that attempts to redirect the attention of linguists, anthropologists, and psychologists to the subjective dimensions of language, language learning, and language use. Even though the book explicitly focuses on non-instructional uses of language, it makes reference throughout to language teachers in the classroom and to their need to teach non-native speakers the culturally appropriate ways of expressing and interpreting emotions in the L2.

Peter Trudgill's account of new-dialect formation is uniformitarian, a position I have embraced explicitly since Mufwene 2001. In Mufwene 2006, I show how similar the mechanisms involved are to those that account for the emergence of creoles, the basic difference lying in the composition of the contact setting's feature pool (see also below). The position I defend is even less moderate, as I argue that in the history of humankind language speciation has basically been a consequence of how internal variation within a language has been affected by migrations of its speakers and additionally by the different contacts the relevant populations have had among themselves (Trudgill's position) and with speakers of other languages in their new, colonial ecologies (Mufwene 2005, 2007, 2008). The reader should not be surprised to see in this response comments that are primarily intended to support and complement the position of the target article.

Judith Felson Duchan and Dana Kovarsky (eds.), Diagnosis as cultural practice. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005. Pp. x, 307, Pb. $32.95.

This volume contributes to a growing body of literature on diagnosis as sociocultural and interactional practices in medicine particularly and society generally. Diagnosis is typically defined solely in terms of expertise within a biomedical model: “the art or act of identifying a disease from its signs and symptoms” (Medline Plus 2005), a definition that incorporates medicine's deeply ambivalent attitude toward lay knowledge with its distinction between symptoms subjectively reported by patients and signs objectively observed by physicians. In the first chapter of this volume, however, the editors set out a broader social model of diagnosis as (i) a way of experiencing, doing, and thinking that is pervasive in Western culture, (ii) constructed by lay people as well as professional experts, (iii) socially situated and culturally sensitive, (iv) a process and product of social interaction and social discourse, that (v) can have a life altering impact on those diagnosed (p. 1).

Trudgill argues cogently against identity and in favor of automaticity as the primary basis for accommodation in koine formation. I agree with the general thrust of his arguments, and below offer qualifications and evidence that support them, but I also present caveats and alternative views, particularly with regard to the ordering relations between identity (or identity formation) and accommodation.

Bernard Spolsky, Language policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. ix, 250, Pb.A$59.95 / US$29.95.

In the past five years, several books (Baker 2002, Ricento 2006, Shohamy 2006) and a journal, all entitled Language policy, have appeared, attesting to the interest in this topic. Volumes in this Cambridge series, “Key Topics in Sociolinguistics,” are meant to provide “accessible yet challenging accounts of the most important issues to consider when examining the relationships between language and society” (n.p.). Spolsky's volume explores many of the debates at the forefront of language policy: ideas of correctness and bad language, bilingualism and multilingualism, language death and efforts to preserve endangered languages, language choice as a human and civil right, and language education policy. Unlike the topical collections previously listed, it suggests a sustained theoretical model of what the field might entail.

Peter Trudgill's essay raises important issues, some of which are uncontroversial while others are less convincing, partly because of a narrow concept of identity and partly because of an infelicitous choice of case studies. For him, the denial of identity seems axiomatic, while I suggest that what his criticism boils down to is the relationship between accommodation and identity, and the question of when and how identity as a social concept is effective, specifically in processes of colonial and postcolonial dialect formation.

In sociolinguistics, where identity tends to be our first explanatory resource, Peter Trudgill's claim that identity is “irrelevant” as a factor in his area of interest is particularly striking. There are at least three questions here. The first is Trudgill's direct concern: whether identity considerations impinged on the development of new national colonial varieties. The second is the underlying question of whether identity, in itself and in general, can stand as a motive for sociolinguistic action and change. The third is whether face-to-face linguistic accommodation, which Trudgill invokes as the core process through which new dialects come to be, can and does function in the absence of identity considerations.

Karen Risager, Language and culture: Global flows and local complexity. (Languages for Intercultural Communication and Education 11.) Buffalo: Multilingual Matters, 2006. Pp. x, 212. Pb $44.95.

Karen Risager seeks to challenge the traditional linguistic orthodoxy that views language and culture as inseparable. The goal of her new book is to establish that language and culture are not necessarily linked and can be analyzed separately. Risager maintains that while languages may be psychologically related to a particular culture and cultural experiences of individuals, they are sociologically separate from other cultural phenomena. She takes a refreshingly new and insightful approach by formulating the critical issues facing language and culture pedagogy and language teaching, and then giving them their due consideration. The implications of Risager's theory and analysis are indeed noteworthy and extensive.