This study investigates the evidence of Australian Aboriginal witnesses in a New South Wales country courthouse, focusing on how and why witnesses are silenced in examination-in-chief, both by their own lawyer and by the judge. The analysis questions the assumption in previous sociolinguistic research that the syntactic form of questions is inherently related to the way in which power is exercised in court. Further, the article highlights how witness silencing in these cases appears to occur particularly in situations where legal professionals are seriously ignorant about fundamental aspects of the everyday cultural values and practices of Aboriginal people. Sociolinguistic microanalysis gives a glimpse of one aspect of the process by which the powerlessness and domination of Aboriginal people is perpetuated through the legal system.

Since the 1970s, it has been assumed that the diverse languages of plantation laborers in Hawai‘i had little effect on the development of Hawai‘i Creole English (HCE); this view supported theories that emphasize the role of innate linguistic universals in creolization. But recent research has revealed (a) widespread bilingualism among locally born children of laborers before HCE emerged, and (b) the dominance of two ethnic groups at the time – the Chinese and Portuguese. This article re-examines the issue of substrate influence in HCE by concentrating on these two groups. Socio-historical and linguistic evidence is presented to show the likelihood that the Cantonese and Portuguese substrates reinforced and expanded various features of existing pidgins that had diffused to Hawai‘i. Portuguese also appears to be the origin of several key features of HCE which differ from those of other creoles. The implications of these findings for universalist theories of creole genesis are discussed.

Creole identity in Louisiana acquired diverse meanings for several ethnic groups during the French and Spanish regimes, before and after the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, and through the last part of the 20th century. In spite of a strong shift toward “Black” identity by many African Americans in the state, those who are fluent Creole French speakers now seem to be the repository of Louisiana Creole identity. This article presents a diachronic study of the different meanings applied to Creole identity which resulted from dramatic social, political, and economic changes. It also delimits and defines the actual attributes of Creole identity within two representative African American communities. Because of the historical and political conditions underlying Creole identity, African Americans who still identify as Creoles insist on linguistic attributes, rather than on the criterion of race, as essential characteristics of their ethnic identity.

Somewhere sociolinguistics must be flourishing. Here we have the second edition of a volume that first appeared in 1984, and the third edition of one that was first published in 1986. It is not as though there are no competing works in print. Hudson 1996 is a revision of a 1980 work, while Trudgill 1995 is the third version of a work that first appeared in 1974. Still in their first manifestation are Holmes 1992 and Romaine 1994. Clearly, there must be a market for these works, since altruism is hardly a common feature of the modern publishing world.

Designing for the first time an undergraduate Cross-Cultural Communication course for a liberal arts college, I was faced with the quandary of how to communicate to my students all that I wanted to teach them about face, politeness, power, communicative style, and discourse – without having to ask them to purchase a very expensive packet of readings. It seems that academic providence took care of me, because at that point the Scollons' book was published. Since then I have used it with great success in my class, which serves students across the spectrum of disciplines.

These two collections of articles offer a spectrum of current work in the field of language and gender. Contributors to both volumes include some leading researchers in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis from Britain, America, and New Zealand; the Kotthoff & Wodak book also contains work by contributors from Germany, Sweden, Holland, and Austria. Despite the latter volume's stated aim of bridging the gap in scholarly awareness between Europe and the English-speaking world, we are in effect still dealing with work from a particular section of Europe, i.e. essentially northern European and Germanic countries. With the exception of one study of Spanish women's talk, southern and Mediterranean Europe are still largely absent from the language and gender research scene presented here.

This is a book about feminist language reform. The subject is not exactly neglected; since the late 1970s there has been no shortage either of practical guides to nonsexist language (for English see, inter alia, Miller & Swift 1980) or of historical, descriptive, and theoretical discussions (book-length examples include Nilsen et al. 1977, Vetterling-Braggin 1981, and Baron 1986). Pauwels's text is primarily descriptive, though it also has theoretical and practical elements; there is an appendix advising on how to draft nonsexist language guidelines. Like most previous work on this subject, it is written by a self-identified feminist, and one who is clearly sympathetic to the general project of feminist language reform. But that is not to say that Pauwels breaks no new ground: in fact, Women changing language has two important distinguishing features.

This is a book containing reports of original research on children aged somewhere between seven and eighteen. All the contributors are based in the US, and with one exception all the thirteen studies were also carried out in the US; the exception, by Marilyn Merritt, also incorporates material from work which she has done in various parts of the African continent. Taken together, the studies cover many aspects of these young people's lives – home, school, playground, voluntary group meetings and work schemes. In most cases, one is struck by the extensive fieldwork which lies behind these research reports. Long periods of observation seem to be commonplace; and the efforts are impressive because, as Shirley Brice Heath points out in her chapter, obtaining naturalistic data from young people of this age can pose problems regarding both access and quality of data. In almost all cases, a corpus of audio or audio-visual recordings forms a basis for at least part of the analysis, though chapters are generally written so as to focus on only a small set of conversation extracts – a strategy which often does little justice to the range of data gathered within the research.

Devoted to addressing various aspects of doctor–patient interactions, this comprehensive volume explores how patient-subjectivities get positioned and constructed as turns unfold into each other in ongoing interactions. Though recent research in conversation and narrative analysis has addressed features of patient-talk (Hamilton 1995, Ferrara 1994), few writers have seriously considered how issues of power are embedded in the language that patients and doctors use to each other, as well as in the genres that contain the talk. AV adds to our knowledge of these critical issues through an in-depth, incisive analysis of her data.

In his book The sacred canopy, Peter Berger wrote, that in the last analysis, “society” is people banded together in the face of death (1967:51). Adelman and Frey have written a small but fascinating study about this very topic. Theirs is an ethnographic study on a residential facility called Bonaventure House (BH), run by a Catholic order, the Alexian Brothers of America. The residents suffer from AIDS; and during the time of the study, BH was for most of them their last home before death. Using participant observation, interviews and questionnaires, Adelman & Frey set out to study how community is built and sustained in these circumstances: People afflicted by a dreaded illness share their everyday lives; death occurs regularly; and the departed are replaced by new people, who become part of the community.

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).

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.

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”.

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.

This volume is meant as a companion piece to three previous volumes published by Cambridge on language in various parts of the English-speaking world (the volume on the United States, edited by Charles Ferguson and Shirley Brice Heath, appeared in 1981, followed in 1984 by one on the British Isles edited by Peter Trudgill, and in 1991 by a volume on Australia edited by Suzanne Romaine). This collection contains 26 short articles, divided into three sets. The first set attempts to provide an overview of sociolinguistic issues in Canada from historical, demographic, and policy perspectives. The second set treats aboriginal languages and the two official languages, French and English; this set includes two articles on language teaching – restricted, however, to the teaching of international languages, mainly as first languages, and to the teaching of French as a second language through immersion methods. The third set offers language profiles of each of Canada's ten provinces, as well as of its two (now three) territories. The organization of the book is meant to provide different angles on sociolinguistic issues in Canada, but unfortunately the result too often is that material is either repeated or consistently left out.

Jones's book should fascinate two audiences: those concerned with the current state of the Welsh language, and those with a more general interest in the phenomenon of language obsolescence. Her presentation is both clearly readable and meticulous in its detail. The work centers on case studies of two sociologically similar but linguistically different communities, Rhymney and Rhosllannerchrugog, situated in different regions of Wales. These studies investigate, in parallel fashion, the varied retention both of Welsh and of its relevant local dialect across the generations. Jones demonstrates greater linguistic retention in the community where Welsh still plays a significant role in everyday social interactions (Rhosllannerchrugog), but her data also illustrate a strong trend in both communities toward the greater use of historically inappropriate forms by younger speakers. Both studies also reveal a recent loss of dialect-specific features, to the point where many schoolchildren in both towns fail even to recognize the local dialect as belonging to their own community. Jones's generational analysis is quite revealing, particularly because the current set of generations have experienced quite different social contexts with respect to the state of the language and its use in official settings.

Singapore has been much discussed as a highly developed, multilingual, multicultural city-state with a clearly articulated language policy, implemented by a strong government as part of its efforts at social engineering. Singapore's policies are variously derided and praised. Some of those who have written on the sociology of language in Singapore have reiterated government policy with little or no assessment of its meaning; thus one regularly reads that all children in Singapore receive education in English and in their mother tongue – a statement that cannot be understood without a grasp of what the concept “mother tongue” means in Singapore's socio-political system. PuruShotam's book comes from a group of scholars who are working with a theoretically informed perspective on language and ethnicity, which questions terminologies and seeks to understand how notions like “race,” “mother tongue,” and “language” work as social constructs. In Singapore this approach has been especially associated with the sociologists Geoffrey Benjamin, Sharon Siddique, Chua Beng Huat, and PuruShotam herself.

Kuipers' book is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the Weyewa Highlands of western Sumba, an island in eastern Indonesia. His initial fieldwork in 1978 resulted in his work Power in performance (1990), about Weyewa “ritual speech” (tenda) – a set of political, religious, and personal verbal genres utilizing a large stock of traditional couplets, in which the two lines are parallel in both rhythm and meaning. Returning to the field in 1989, 1990, and 1994, Kuipers discovered that the obvious loci of change – new schools, roads, economic activities, and religious ideas – could not by themselves account for the direction of change in Weyewa language practices. Stimulated by a recent body of literature in linguistic anthropology dealing with “linguistic ideology,” Kuipers attempts in the present volume to show that changes in ritual speech genres – reinterpretations, erasures, refunctionalizations, and condensations – cannot be explained without taking into account local and imported beliefs about the nature of language.