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.

Alessandro Duranti (ed.), A companion to linguistic anthropology. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004, 2006. Pp. xx, 625. Pb $39.95.

Looked at one way, Duranti's hefty edited volume could be construed as one massive speech act that performatively attempts to crystallize “linguistic anthropology” as a discipline. Twenty-two chapters, many of them written by leading lights in the field, are grouped into four sections: “Speech communities, contact, and variation,” “The performing of language,” “Achieving subjectivities and intersubjectivities through language,” and “The power in language.” Many chapters, however, are so richly conceived their content cross-cuts these groupings. The authors have been charged with crafting an introductory account of their assigned topics, which they do for the most part with success, pitching their arguments to appeal to readers ranging from advanced undergraduates to scholars seeking an entrée into new intellectual territory. The ambitious reader who covers the entire volume can extrapolate a portrait of how the discipline has come into focus over the past three decades or so under the influence of certain key scholars (Susan Gal, Jane Hill, Judith Irvine, Elinor Ochs, Michael Silverstein, and Kathryn Woolard, to name but a few). And all readers will emerge informed about the tools linguistic anthropology offers to understand how selves and social worlds are negotiated through language.

Deborah Cameron & Don Kulick (eds.), The language and sexuality reader. London & New York: Routledge, 2006. Pp. 322. Pb $41.95.

This collection of articles represents a range of different takes on the subject of language, gender, and sexuality. The editors' definition of their project is deliberately broad: “the role played by language in producing and organizing sex as a meaningful domain of human experience” (p. 1). Accordingly, there are 23 articles organized into two unequal parts. The first is historical and takes up one-third of the book, while the second is contemporary and comprises the latter two-thirds. Each section is prefaced by a brief introduction providing the theoretical background informing the choice of texts. Overall, although occasionally lacking focus, the collection is intellectually stimulating, absorbing, and often downright enjoyable. For instructors teaching a course on language and gender, this reader would make a good starting place for class discussion, including as it does many key pieces on topics like verbally positioning oneself as heterosexual, the discourses of rape and resistance, and the creation of sexual identities among the ambiguously gendered.

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.

Ian Hutchby, Media talk: Conversation analysis and the study of broadcasting. Berkshire, UK: Open University Press, 2006. Pp. xii, 185. Hb £60.00, Pb £18.99.

Ian Hutchby's Media talk is an introduction to the analysis of talk-in-interaction on television and radio. Since the early 1990s, attention to interactive and discursive patterns in these broadcast media has produced a large, rich, and diversified body of work, targeting a wide range of media genres and issues from a variety of approaches. Gradually, this body of work is combining to form a unique field of study. One possible indication of this gradual consolidation of the field and of its diversity and richness is the recent, almost simultaneous publication of two introductory texts on media talk that share the same title but differ in scope, methodological approach, and generic breadth (the other is Tolson 2006). Despite its development, the study of media talk has remained until now on the periphery of media studies, and attention to the details of talk-in-interaction is often missing from the methodological mainstream of the discipline. Ian Hutchby's book aims at addressing this gap by introducing the study of media talk to students of the media. The book can be read as an extended argument for the analysis of talk, demonstrating its effectiveness in addressing macroscopic questions regarding broadcast media as a social institution from a unique perspective grounded in micro-analysis.

Louis de Saussure & Peter Schulz (eds.), Manipulation and ideologies in the twentieth century. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2005. Pp. xvi, 312. Hb €115.00/$US 138.00

One of the interesting developments in discourse analysis is its increasing interest in the explicit description and account of politically relevant text and talk and their relationships to various forms of social cognition. The collection of studies edited by Louis de Saussure and Peter Schulz is among those books that focus on this interface between political discourse and political cognition. It does so specifically by examining one of the most conspicuous forms of discursive power abuse – manipulation – as well as its relationship with ideologies, especially the totalitarian right-wing ideologies of the 20th century.

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.