Korowai of West Papua practice a register of transgressive vocabulary substitutions in which a referent's normal designation is replaced by another expression with independent semantic meaning. Uttering a substitute term in the presence of its referent is thought to damage the referent. Usually the terms are carefully avoided, but they can also be deliberately uttered in anger. Substitutions highlight uncanny iconic resemblances between entities that are otherwise mutually incongruous. Substitutions often involve grotesque imagery of bodily disintegration, and they focus on strange margins close to humans' positions. Speakers use the register to portray uncertainty about the categorial integrity not just of referents but also of language users themselves. Through the register's core idea of avoiding damaging effects of iconic connections beneath fragile surface appearances, Korowai express a reflexive sensibility about language, in which transparently affirmative semantic relations between words and referents are a contingent pragmatic possibility, not a natural certainty.A draft of this article was presented in June 2006 at a conference on “Honorification and Enregisterment” at the University of Chicago. I thank Sue Philips, Sue Gal, and Michael Silverstein for inviting me to speak, and I thank all participants for their generous comments. Additional crucial and detailed help was given by Courtney Handman, Laura Hendrickson, Steve Hibbard, Barbara Johnstone, Webb Keane, Anne Lorimer, and Alan Rumsey. Fieldwork in 1995–1997 and 2001–2002 was made possible by Fulbright-IIE, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Reed College, the Luce Foundation, the Australian National University (RSPAS), the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), and Universitas Cenderawasih. I am grateful to all Korowai I have met for their patience and humor.

This article explores a public debate that took place in Sweden in 2002 in relation to the Swedish Liberal Party's proposal to introduce a language test for naturalization. On the basis of textual analysis of relevant policy documents and newspaper articles, it examines the explicit and implicit facets of an ideology of language testing. It is argued that a seemingly liberal, anti-racist, and anti-discriminatory ideology is emerging, which, in its explicit facet, calls for the introduction of a language test for citizenship as a practical way of diminishing social differentiation. However, drawing upon Bourdieu's notion of rites of institution, it is shown that such a test would actually contribute to, rather than challenge, the reproduction of social differentiation, thereby legitimizing the exclusion of certain groups from both the civic and symbolic domains of Sweden as a nation-state.I want to acknowledge that the research that resulted in the present article was conducted at the Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Stockholm University. However, my current affiliation and address for correspondence is Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK; email: [email protected]. I also want to take the opportunity to thank Kenneth Hyltenstam, Sally Johnson, Barbara Johnstone, Ingrid Piller, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on previous drafts of this article.

This article is concerned with understanding and analyzing the role of the individual in Navajo poetry performances, in particular, three performances of putatively the same poem by the Navajo poet Laura Tohe. One performance is the written orthographic poem, and the other two are oral performances that have been recorded and analyzed. It is argued that a focus on the individual performer and on multiple performances can provide insight into the relationship between social constructions of self and identity within the constraints and opportunities particular media and contexts provide. It also reveals the importance of studying individual creativity in language and culture research.I would like to thank Andy Hofling, Barbara Johnstone, David Samuels, and Laura Tohe for comments on various versions of this article. Jonathan Hill, as usual, has been a sounding board for many of the ideas that finally found their way into this article. Thanks also to Jane Adams for some useful advice at a critical moment. I also want to thank Elizabeth Keating, Scott Rushforth, Joel Sherzer, Pauline Turner Strong, and Anthony Woodbury for comments on a much earlier draft. The research for this study was made possible by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the University of Texas at Austin. I want to thank the Navajo Nation for granting me a permit to do research on the emergence of poetry on the Navajo Nation. Thanks also to Leighton Peterson for his help during fieldwork. I also want to thank all the Navajo poets who allowed me to record and interview them. I further want to thank the various people of the Navajo Nation who in one way or another aided in my research. Views expressed in this article are my responsibility, as are any mistakes that remain.

This article combines textual, videotape, historical, and ethnographic evidence to describe the Bangla psychiatric register and its enregisterment. Enregisterment is a process “through which a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable [and] … socially recognized” (Agha 2003:231). The emergence of psychiatric registers in Europe and, later, Bangladesh bore the particular burden of psychiatry's “magic complex” – its need to convince a skeptical public that its perceived associations with magic and religion were finished, vanquished in part by discursive measures, focused on a scientizing drive. Psychiatric Bangla appears to involve the sort of pervasive use of parallelism normally associated with ritual texts. This indicates a profound hybridity that may contribute to the psychiatric unease epitomized in the magic complex.The author gratefully acknowledges suggestions and comments from Carol Berkenkotter, Dan Conrad, Laurence Kirmayer, Barbara Johnstone, Greg Matoesian, and two anonymous reviewers for Language in Society. Sayeed Ahmed provided enormous help with transliterating most of the letters analyzed, and with translating some. Anna Corwin and other students in my Linguistic Anthropology Lab (fall 2006) helped with figures. Naturally, the author is responsible for all flaws that remain.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Dagmar Dueber, Nigerian Pidgin English: Language contact, variation and change in an African urban setting. London: Battlebridge, 2005. Pp. xiii, 273. Pb £25.

This is a corpus-based study of Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) among the educated in the urban center of Lagos. Deuber's report on the use of NPE in Lagos makes for interesting comparison with the spread and use of other contact varieties in urban areas in Africa (e.g., Sheng in Nairobi; see Fink 2005 and references therein) and its impact on indigenous languages. It is also comparable with the discussions of urban varieties of creoles reported in Patrick's (1999) work and more recently in Hackert 2004. One of the obvious issues is the functioning of the variety in new public formal domains. Issues related to both corpus and status planning are discussed (cf. Devonish 1986). To help the reader navigate the vast amount of data, there are several maps, sample questionnaires, and complete transcriptions from elicitations and interviews. The included CD contains sociodemographic data for all the informants and background information on the texts, translations, and sound samples. The book should prove beneficial to sociolinguists of varying persuasions, especially creolists, variationists, and discourse analysts.

Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, Marjatta Palander, and Esa Penttilä (eds.), Dialects across borders. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. xii, 291, Hb $138.00.

This volume offers a selection of papers originally presented at the Eleventh International Conference on Methods in Dialectology held at the University of Joensuu, North Karelia, Finland in 2002. The conference's theme has been taken as the title of the book, and each of the essays included here explores the influence of borders on linguistic behavior. For readers who might assume this collection to represent only the tradition of dialect geography it is important to note that the editors had a rather expansive sense of “border” in selecting the essays, and as a result the contributors display a broad range of ways of conceptualizing borders and their influence. The papers are grouped thematically according to the types of borders they examine: Those in Part I deal with borders in the usual geographical sense, those in Part II explore borders that are more social or cognitive in character, and those in Part III investigate borders between languages. The editors open the book with an introduction that sketches the contents of each essay.

Ken Hyland, Metadiscourse: Exploring interaction in writing. London & New York: Continuum. 2005. Pp. x, 230. Hb £75.00, Pb £25.00.

Metadiscourse is increasingly recognized as fundamental to the way in which writers construct text to achieve their communicative goals, but it remains a somewhat vague concept in certain respects, and the term is used in different ways by different scholars; so a full-scale treatment of the phenomenon is potentially of great interest. Ken Hyland has published a number of articles in recent years on metadiscourse, and he is clearly well placed to write this survey of the topic, designed, according to the blurb, as an “accessible introduction” for students of applied linguistics and teachers, as well as academics. The book is divided into three main parts: The first reviews previous attempts to define metadiscourse and proposes a revised definition and classification; the second, and longest, explores the functions of metadiscourse in a range of different types of text; and the third focuses specifically on the language classroom and suggests ways in which students can be encouraged to improve their command of metadiscourse.

Joseph A. Foley (ed.), Language, education and discourse: Functional approaches. London: Continuum, 2004. Pp. xii, 337. Hb. $150.00, Pb. $49.95.

Since it was developed by Michael Halliday more than 40 years ago, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has become increasingly influential in discourse analytic and educational studies. Readers interested in this approach will find illustrations of the theory and its applications in this product of the International Systemic Functional Linguistics Association meeting in 1999 in Singapore. SFL, a theory of language that links meaning with form and describes language in terms of its role in social contexts, offers researchers interested in language in society theoretically grounded ways of focusing on the meaning-making resources of language. These SFL studies, in contexts that span the years of schooling and focus on a range of disciplinary contexts, including mathematics, history, science, and language arts, highlight the power of classroom discourse and the role of language in construing ideologies.

Albert Valdman, Julie Auger, and Deborah Piston-Hatlen (eds.), Le Français en Amérique du Nord: État présent. Quebec: Presses de l'Université Laval, 2005. Pp. 583. Hb. $45.00.

The loss of Quebec to Great Britain in 1763, the sale of Louisiana to the United States four decades later, and low levels of emigration from France to North America in the 19th century all serve to mask the major role played by French speakers in the European settlement of the continent in the 17th and 18th centuries, the linguistic consequences of which are still with us. In this fine collection of studies, the picture that emerges of French in North America today is one of contrasts: successful efforts to reverse language shift in Quebec, varying degrees of failure elsewhere.

Louise J. Ravelli and Robert A. Ellis (eds.), Analysing academic writing: Contextual frameworks. London & New York: Continuum, 2004. (Pb 2005). Pp. xvi, 280. Hb £25.00.

Rather than focus on expert writing – as the title might suggest – the 14 contributors to this volume have chosen to center on issues related to students' written efforts to cope with the exigencies of the academic discourse community. The analyzed texts are viewed as “intimately related to their contexts” (p. 1). The latter are approached in ways based mainly on Systemic Functional Linguistics, along with “related social-constructivist frameworks and more generalised perspectives on ethnography” (1). The texts that provide empirical data were produced mainly by undergraduate students, but some are by high school and graduate students and, with the exception of one (German) set, were written by users of English (now the language of international academic exchange) as a first, second, or foreign language. The type of student, the type of academic writing (size, genre, level, discipline) and various other aspects of the social, cultural, and educational context are treated in their interrelatedness, which is theorized about, supported by empirical evidence, and, naturally, accompanied by pedagogical considerations in each study.

Andrew Cowell and Alonzo Moss, Sr. (eds.), Arapaho historical traditions told by Paul Moss. (Publications of the Algonquian Text Society.) Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2005. Pp. viii, 531. Pb $48.00.

This volume gathers 12 oral narratives originally told by Paul Moss (1911–1995), recorded by his son Alonzo Moss, and later transcribed and translated by Alonzo Moss and Andrew Cowell. Some of the stories were originally told to an audience of elders of the Northern Arapaho Tribe, to which Paul Moss belonged, and others to high school students, not all of whom understood Arapaho. Significantly, the audiences were in all cases composed exclusively of Arapahos.

Mark R. V. Southern, Contagious couplings: Transmission of expressives in Yiddish echo phrases. Westport, CT & London: Praeger, 2005. Pp. xx, 351. Hb $99.95.

Mark Southern's book deals in great depth and considerable detail with a question that is quite specific yet has wide ramifications as an example of language contact and change and offers many insights into the functioning of expressive forms. The book focuses on the origin of one particular type of expressive phrase – the highly productive Yiddish binomial dismissive pairs with the structure X – shmX (as in gelt-shmelt ‘money – who cares?’). The pattern has now spread beyond Yiddish into Hebrew, Russian, and of course English, where expressions like linguistics shminguistics, to cite just one of Southern's examples, are recognized as unmistakable Yiddishisms.

Anna Fenyvesi (ed.), Hungarian language contact outside Hungary: Studies on Hungarian as a minority language. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. xx, 424. Hb $162.00.

Hungarians living outside Hungary left the country in various ways: Some were voluntary migrants who began to seek economic opportunity or political asylum, while others became involuntary immigrants to neighboring countries when the Treaty of Trianon shrank the borders of Hungary by two-thirds in 1920. Because these involuntary minorities were difficult for researchers to discuss under the communist regimes that ruled until 1989 (p. 4), this edited volume introduces a recent body of research that previously has been published mostly in Hungarian.

C. Paulin (ed.), Multiculturalisme, multilinguisme et milieu urbain. Besançon: Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté, Université de Franche-Comté, 2005. Pp. 3, 286. Hb €32.

This edited book, written in French, brings together the contributions of 15 researchers from a number of research centers in France. Their studies are situated in various regions of France and around the world. The book provides an understanding of languages and cultures in contact in urban settings and includes work on language variation, language policies, the construction of identity, and linguistic minorities. Most of the chapters focus on a linguistic analysis of languages and cultures in contact, and some address the sociological and political aspects of these languages. Some of the data come from quantitative analysis of languages in different settings, including variation and ethnicity in England (S. Dalban), the preposition qu in Chiac, Canada (P. D. Giancarli), and Anglo-American lexis (A. Paulin).

Valerie E. Besag, Understanding girls' friendships, fights and feuds: A practical approach to girls' bullying. Maidenhead, Berkshire: Open University Press/McGraw-Hill Education, 2006. Pp. 237. Hb £60.00. Pb £19.99.

This volume addresses the question of bullying among young girls through a detailed investigation of the strategies and language employed by girls to control peer relations. Section 1 accordingly introduces the issue of bullying, the lack of any rationale for the fractious nature of girls' friendships, and the covert nature of their forms of aggression to entice some into their groups and exclude others. The core of the book consists of a 16-month study examining girls' conversations and social behavior in an informal activity club.

Ruth Mace, Clare J. Holden and Stephen Shennan (eds.), The evolution of cultural diversity: A phylogenetic approach. London: UCL Press, 2005 Pp. x, 291. Pb $34.95.

This book is in two parts, the first of which presents papers on unified anthropological themes and the second, coevolutionary approaches to some anthropological questions, involving the integration of findings from more than one anthropological field.