This book should be of particular interest to sociolinguists who believe in the value of discourse analysis for a better understanding of society. As indicated in the title, Varro's overall objective is to contribute to a nascent sociologie de la mixité by examining the concept of “mixed” as used at various levels of life in society. Her insightful analysis results in an enlightening description of some fundamental aspects of contemporary French society regarding the condition of immigrants and foreigners in the nation. She accomplishes this task through a constructionist approach to language inspired by J. L. Austin and Pierre Bourdieu, among others. The focus is on behavioral consequences of the categorizations and discourse engendered by a deceptively simple term, mixte, as applied to individuals or other social units. For instance, so-called mixed families are often automatically considered as dysfunctional and may become scapegoats at the societal level.

In Representing rape, Ehrlich provides a detailed linguistic account of a sexual assault trial. The data for this study come from two sources: a university tribunal and a criminal trial in which complaints were brought against a single man, pseudonym Matt, on behalf of two women. While focusing in each chapter on particular linguistic details, Ehrlich traces their use across several contexts within the legal proceedings – direct testimony, cross-examination and the delivery of judgments. In doing so, the author shows how the details of language use feed into larger frameworks of meaning and legal practice.

Bilingualism is a mainstay of current sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic research, and it has successfully migrated from the narrow concerns of “applied linguistics” to the very core of theoretical linguistic debate and argumentation. Research on bilinguals at both the societal and individual levels is now contributing to a deeper understanding of the place of language in human interaction and cognition. By its very nature, the study of bilingualism requires that researchers become involved with speakers at the level of communication, often in field situations that require subtle sociological and psychological insights relating to language choice and language switching as speakers attempt to establish personal and group identity.

This collection of eleven articles addresses in diverse ways the role of language in the construction of social, regional, national, and supranational identities. The contributions are not based on a common theoretical concept and common methodology. The approaches to the subject vary greatly, ranging from a subtle empirical sociolinguistic study embedded in the theoretical framework of variational linguistics and the theory of language maintenance and language loss, to articles exploring aspects of language policies and political science, to an anthropological contribution.

It is frequently remarked that, for instance, the French language is the French nation, or the Arabic language is the Arab nation. Whatever the nature of the link between language and nation is, language is perceived as an important component in defining social groups.

This book is a collection of 10 articles treating different aspects of francophone rap music and hip-hop culture. Despite the facts that the first French rap recordings date from 1984 and that France has since become a center of rap music second only to the United States, this is the first book devoted to the subject. André Prévos begins the volume with a history of French rap music from its origins through the 1990s. Here we are introduced to many of the names that appear in later chapters. The following chapters treat the regional specificity of Marseilles rap (Jean-Marie Jacono); rap audiences in Marseilles (Anthony Pecqueux); the politics of French rap (Paul Silverstein); rap as a social movement (Manuel Boucher); hip-hop as an aesthetic subculture (Anne-Marie Green); an ethnography of tagging (Alain Milon); hip-hop dance (Hugues Bazin); rap in Libreville, Gabon (Michelle Auzanneau); and rap in Québec (Roger Chamberland). All the chapters except those by Prévos, Silverstein, and Chamberland were translated from French.

Many casual observers outside Asia believe that everyone in Hong Kong, owing to its British colonial past, speaks English as fluently as the queen (or, at least, George Bush). Others, hearing the grunts of martial artists like Jackie Chan, might think that English is truly a foreign entity to the people of Hong Kong, as unknown to them as, say, pizza or hamburgers. Both assumptions, as Kingsley Bolton shows in this fascinating new collection of essays, are quite wrong. Instead, the place of English in Hong Kong is probably unique in the world: It is neither simply a variety poorly mimicking the language of the UK, nor an imperial tongue imposed on a subservient populace. It is these dynamics of culture, identity, economics, globalization, education – and, indeed, politics – that are addressed in this stimulating book.

In Sista, speak! Sonja Lanehart presents the language and literacy autobiographies of three generations of African American women. These women tell the stories of their education and aspirations, focusing on how their literacy and language were influenced by social, economic, and political forces within school, family and community. Lanehart interprets the rich descriptions in their stories by examining the ideological perspectives of “experiences and cultures and ecologies” that shaped the women's views of themselves and their worlds” (p. 29).

For those who find it useful to conceive of a language as a meaning-conveying instrument embedded in a cultural system, this brief, well-written treatment of pronominal address in Spanish will hold few surprises, but it will provide welcome and well-reasoned documentation of the major positions, supplemented by equally welcome expansions and elaborations of familiar points. Speakers of Spanish tend to address some interlocutors on some occasions using second-person verb forms, while addressing others, or the same on different occasions, using third-person forms, variably reinforcing the verbal morphology with the pronoun tú in the first cases and usted in the second. The author investigates alternative forms of what she calls “pronominal address” (irrespective of whether the pronoun is actually used), with data obtained from observations of workers at a construction company in Veracruz, Mexico, and from their own explanations of why they use one address form or the other. A good sample of the data is provided, presented in standard Spanish orthography with good, readable translations into English. For theoretical underpinning, the author offers the ethnography of speaking (Hymes 1962) and speech codes (Philipsen 1997).

Publications received.

Benjamin Bailey's Language, race and negotiation of identity is the first extensive sociolinguistic study of a Dominican-American communicative community, and is thus a timely and welcome addition to the literature on Spanish/English bilingual situations in the United States. Bailey conducted field work among second-generation working-class Dominican-American high school students in Providence, Rhode Island, from August 1996 to July 1997. (The school at the time of field work was 60% Hispanic, 20% Dominican, and the rest largely Puerto Rican and Guatemalan.) His investigation focuses on the ways in which linguistic deployments by these young people enact ethnic and racial identity. His data are drawn from videotaped activities of six high school students in school and in one nonschool setting, interviews about language use and ethnic/racial issues with high school and college students, and general participant observation in school, home, and community contexts (p. 36).

Publications received.

I write with deep regret to inform the sociolinguistics community of the death of Dr. Cheryl Wharry on July 7, 2003, at her home. Dr. Wharry taught linguistics and TESOL at Columbus State University, Columbus, GA. She took her Ph.D. from Oklahoma State University, where her dissertation was “‘I'm gonna preach it, amen’: The role of ‘amen’ and similar formulaic expressions in African American sermonic discourse.” Her recent publication in Language in Society 32(2), “Amen and Hallelujah preaching: Discourse functions in African American sermons,” and her book review, which coincidentally appeared in the same issue, show us something of what we have lost.