Linguistic minority movements have long adopted dominant discourses linking language and community. Analysis of two sites of discursive production in francophone Canada (literacy centers and a call center workplace in Ontario) shows that current socioeconomic changes challenge those discourses. Language and community are uncoupled and redefined as commodities with exchange value in the globalized market for services and information. “Community” serves mainly to legitimize struggles for privileged access to newly commodified linguistic and cultural resources.

This article analyzes the specific pragmatics of an extremely asymmetrical example of market interaction between Spanish-speaking middlemen Mestizos and Hñahñu (Otomi) occasional sellers in the market of Ixmiquilpan, in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico, where Hñahñu is still spoken. The fine indications of interpersonal cross-cultural conflict found in the transcript (e.g., duration of turns, varied use of indexical terms by buyers to address sellers, and the timing of verbal performance) allow us to understand how interethnic, gender, and power differences operate in this specific setting, relating the global and local levels. Detailed analysis of one case demonstrates the validity of certain universal theories regarding the use of language and enables us to understand the unavoidable conditions of conversation in terms of their universal status vis-à-vis the use of language as the material expression of power, or symbolic violence

This article examines how so-called ordinary or casual conversational practices in the contemporary United States are constrained and structured in terms of where, when, how, and with whom people choose and are able to interact socially. The focus of analysis is the middle-class sociolinguistic practice of “coffeetalk” – a term borrowed from U.S. popular culture to signal the naturalized conflation of conversation with the commercialized consumption of coffee, space, and other commodities. The discussion of coffeetalk involves research methods including critical analyses of the marketing rhetoric of coffeehouse corporations; informal interviews with coffeehouse owners, employees and patrons; and the author's observations as a “native” participant in coffeetalk and other commodified modes of middle-class social interaction. By situating coffeetalk within its spatial, temporal and social contexts, this analysis challenges the claim of some sociolinguists that conversation is a “naturally occurring” phenomenon that is ontologically prior to other speech genres. A systematic investigation of the material and social dimensions of seemingly ordinary conversational practices demonstrates that these are inextricably implicated in the political, economic, and cultural-ideological processes of global capitalism, as symbolized by the increasingly ubiquitous Starbucks Coffee Company.

According to some discussions concerning new information technologies and technologically enhanced communication, we are now in a revolution as profound as the printing press. The Internet is creating new kinds of meetingplaces and work areas and the possibilities of new types of relationships across time and space. This article reports on some ways that the Internet is shaping language practices in the Deaf community, with an interest in how new tools mediate and influence human behavior, including language and the organization of interaction. This includes the development and manipulation of a computer-mediated image of self and other, creativity and problem-solving in new communicative spaces, creating reciprocal perspectives, new participation frameworks, and specifics of language change. For the first time, deaf people can communicate using manual visual language, in many cases their native language, across space and time zones. This groundbreaking situation makes the Deaf community a particularly productive site for research into relationships between technological innovations and new communicative practices.

This volume contributes to the study of language ideology by focusing on the historical processes through which ideological positions about the relationship of language and society are produced and reproduced. Specifically, the contributors seek to contextualize the ways that language ideologies are contested in particular, often well publicized debates about language and its relationships to society. While ostensibly about linguistic issues, these debates, at one level or another, also address questions of power and national identity.

This book's manifest aim is “to bring to the non-specialized reader a substantial selection that reflects the … regional and disciplinary variations in views toward and experiences with ethnicity” (3). To be more precise, the book is about issues of ethnicity and language, as the title correctly suggests. It will certainly be of interest to nonspecialists and less advanced students, and useful as a resource for teaching and seminar work. I will comment on it on the basis of this declared intention, globally – that is, I will not go into the details of individual contributions.

One of the virtues of David Herman's Story logic lies in its attempt to bring together literary and linguistic approaches to the study of narrative. The attempt results in a synthesis that promotes a better understanding of discourse for literary scholars and a deeper grasp of basic narratology tools for discourse analysts. The title of the volume reflects one of the main points of the book: that “stories both have a logic and are logic in their own right” (p. 22) because they constitute a powerful instrument for understanding the world. The more general objective of the analyses presented in the volume is to work toward a cognitive approach to narrative in which narrative understanding is explained as a process of creating and updating mental models of particular storyworlds. Thus, Herman looks at language theory and narrative theory as theoretical frames that not only can enrich each other, but that also constitute a resource for cognitive science in general.

In 1971, women students at the Harvard Divinity School began protesting the use in their classes of BOMFOG (“brotherhood of man, fatherhood of god”) talk, the equation of the universal with the masculine exemplified by apparently generic uses of forms like he and man. Responding to reports of these protests in the Harvard Crimson, Harvard's linguistics faculty wrote a letter to the editor explaining that English masculine forms were linguistically “unmarked” for gender and patronizingly assuring the protestors that “there is no need for anxiety or pronoun envy” (quoted in Livia, p. 3). Once launched, that phrase begged to be a title, and Anna Livia's enlightening book is a most suitable bearer. This is a volume from which linguists and others interested in the linguistic encoding of gender can learn much.

Mediated Discourse (MD) reports a longitudinal study of the development of a one-year-old child, focusing on a single, narrowly defined social practice – handing, or “the simple practice of giving an object to another person” (p. 12). In this book, R. Scollon proposes a framework of mediated discourse to address social (practice) theory, which was “badly in need of an ontogenetic view of social practice” (vii).

Although Ron Scollon is an author of both books under review, the second differs from the first, theoretical, work in focusing on practical application. Professional communication in international settings (PCIIS) is an excellent book that is much needed by professionals, researchers, trainers, or anyone else involved in business or professional communication across cultural boundaries. Different from many other books on the same subject, its goal is to offer a method for effective communication, and it can be used as either a textbook or a reference.

Two remarkable books arrived on my desk from quite different sources early in 2003. My purpose in reviewing them is twofold: first, to convince the general reader that the study of culture can no longer ignore the transformative role of written documents in social and mental life in either antique cultures or in contemporary modernizing ones; and second, to introduce the authors of these fine books to each other.

In this well-focused collection of papers, editors Gottlieb & Chen present an overview of language planning and policy issues in East Asia. Given the time-honored emphasis on scholarship and especially on writing that is characteristic of the region, it is not surprising to find that the book is rich in historical information. However, it also provides a wealth of insights regarding recent developments across related yet unique settings. In this sense, the volume fulfills its publicized aim of meeting the needs of students, researchers, and educated readers with an interest in the complex language practices of the region.

This is the sixth and presumably final volume in an ambitious series. The first four volumes were distinguished chronologically according to the traditional paradigm for the history of English: Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, and Present Day English. The other two volumes are organized geographically. Volume 5 examined English outside England in most of the expected places (e.g., Scotland, Ireland, Australia), with the exception of North America, to which the present volume is devoted. As the general editor, Richard Hogg, writes (p. xi), the series is designed to offer “a solid discussion of the full range of the history of English” to anglicists and general linguists alike. Readers of the latter category will certainly find this volume accessible. In fact, the inclusion of a glossary of terms extends that accessibility to readers outside linguistics as well. Specialists, however, are likely to be disappointed by the unevenness of the collection.

In her preface to A place to stand, Julie Lindquist writes, “The experience of class in America is impossible to explain, difficult to render, and dangerous to address.” In spite of these caveats, she has combined her experience as a bartender with her graduate training in theoretical linguistics to render and address, if not to explain, rhetorical performance among the regulars in a working class-bar she calls the Smokehouse.

These three volumes invite a volume in return. They bring Haida to the fore of what is known of oral narrative in Native North America. One finds a dedicated philological sleuth, tracking down original texts and unpublished manuscripts (see A story as sharp as a knife, pp. 221–2; Nine visits to the mythworld, p. 17); a historian of anthropology, reconstructing and relating the story of a young fieldworker who is now largely forgotten (John R. Swanton); a pursuit of detail that enters into a past world, identifying in footnotes and photographs the places and foods and material culture of that world; and a creative writer reimagining Haida men, on islands crumbled by disease and occupation, re-creating in narratives a world their minds could still imagine. Not least, one finds someone for whom the arts are a normal part of life, and for whom the conception and misfortunes of a painting by Velasquez (44–49) can illuminate the relationship between myth time and historical time in Haida. Finally, the writing displays an ease, indeed a gift for words, that befits an established poet, and the books themselves are attractive, as befits a typographer versed in visual arts. (Bringhurst was invited to bring out a new edition, Chappell & Bringhurst 1999, of a standard book. The new edition indeed displays two pages [298–99] in line and verse of Victoria Howard's “Gitskux and his older brother” [Clackamas Chinook]; see Hymes 1983. His book of 1992 has been a bestseller.

We have become accustomed to seeing reference works in CD-ROM format, such as the Oxford English dictionary, often alongside equivalent hardcopy publications. By contrast, Taitaduhaan (‘Our language’) is not a reference work, and it is published not merely in that familiar electronic format but rather as an interactive CD-ROM, in which the user can move with a finger-click from written text, to video images, to audio recordings. Is this a “book,” or an entirely new form of publishing? In any case, “reading” it is definitely a new experience for us in these first years of the 21st century.