This article revisits Labov's (1962, 1972a) germinal sociolinguistic work on Martha's Vineyard speech, providing a synchronic analysis of the /ay/ diphthong in words like right and time, and, in turn, a diachronic perspective on a sound change in progress. Labov observed that the first element of the /ay/ diphthong was raised in the speech of Martha's Vineyarders, particularly fishermen, and he correlated it with social factors like identity (i.e., local heritage) and resistance to summer visitors. The present authors provide a sociolinguistic analysis of /ay/ from a new set of data collected in a Martha's Vineyard speech community. The outcome suggests a change in the linguistic pattern observed by Labov, which the authors argue is linked to socio-economic restructuring and resulting ideological changes taking place on the island. The acoustic and social factors are analyzed using VARBRUL to show how /ay/ variation today patterns with various internal and external factors found to be salient in Labov's earlier study.

Friendship is studied as a culturally and contextually embedded entity. Focusing on the interactions between network marketers and their prospects, this article proposes four key central elements through which participants make sense of themselves when their identities are in transgression and conflict. Instead of being essentialist, the four elements of friendship – intimacy, control, trust, and positiveness – are highly interactional and dynamic elements that can be negotiated by participants in a conversation. It is argued that Grice's Cooperative Principle is valid, but this should be enhanced by participants' specific culture and prior experience. The notion of “face” in politeness models should be expanded in light of its dynamic characteristics in interaction.

From 1945 until 1987, the KMT (Nationalist) government enforced its strict Mandarin Language Policy in schools throughout Taiwan, and students were forbidden to speak local languages or dialects. Recent reversal of this policy allows schools to teach these formerly forbidden varieties. Despite some attention from scholars, it remains to explore the impact of these policies on successive generations of bilingual speakers. This study explores the perceptions of parents, grandparents, and young adults. The data show that school-based policies have an impact on family-based speaking practices. They also demonstrate the complex interplay between public and private histories in the development of linguistic ideologies and language as capital.

After nearly two centuries of contact with Europeans, the Māori language of New Zealand was, by the 1960s, threatened with extinction. Accompanying a movement for ethnic revival, a series of grassroots regeneration efforts that established adult, preschool, and autonomous school immersion programs has over the past two decades increased substantially the number of Māori who know and use their language, but this has not yet led to the reestablishment of natural intergenerational transmission. More recently, responding to growing ethnic pressures, the New Zealand government has adopted a Māori language policy and is starting to implement it. Seen in its widest social, political, and economic context, this process can be understood not as colonial language loss followed by postcolonial reversing language shift activities, but as the continuation of a long process of negotiation of accommodation between autochthonous Māori and European settlers.

Mesthrie's Concise encyclopedia of sociolinguistics (hereafter, CESO) is a newly edited, condensed, and updated offshoot of the Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, originally published in ten volumes in 1993. This laudable volume aims to “give a comprehensive overview of the main topics in an important branch of language study, generally known as Sociolinguistics” (p. 1). As theoretical background, the branch is traced from the Sanskrit scholar Pānini to more recent origins in historical linguistics, anthropology, rural dialectology, and the study of mixed languages. The field is further presented as the most proper of all branches for language study today, as Mesthrie – updating Labov's (1972) famous claim about the implications of the term sociolinguistics – writes that “having ‘human communication’ as part of the definition of language makes it impossible to study language comprehensively without due regard to social contexts of speech” (1). CESO is an attempt to catalog the relevant components of those social contexts.

There is little doubt that critical applied linguistics is one of the most controversial and contentious areas in linguistics today. This new book, Critical applied linguistics: A critical introduction, is an attempt to provide a much-needed detailed and comprehensive introduction to this emergent approach. It is written by Alastair Pennycook of the University of Technology, Sydney, who has been one of the major proponents of critical applied linguistics during the past decade.

In this book, author Salikoko Mufwene offers a chronology of his views on language evolution as they have developed over the past 12 years. Mufwene understands the linguistic evolutionary process in terms of a language's external ecology – that is, its position relative to other languages with which it moves in and out of contact, the power relations among groups of different language varieties in the setting, and so on – as well as its internal ecology, or the coexistence in a given setting of the linguistic features, and their relative weight. Although Mufwene uses creole languages as a starting point, his purpose is to highlight general characteristics of language evolution; he argues that, in the essentials of language change, varieties such as pidgins and creoles differ little if at all from non-pidgins and non-creoles. To build his case, Mufwene draws from population genetics, seeing any given language not as an organism but rather as its own “species.”

The music of everyday speech (hereafter MES) is a book for discourse analysts interested in incorporating a theoretically grounded account of sound production, or, prosody, into their research. Readers of Language in Society will find MES to be the first book of its kind. It includes an overview of phonological, discourse analytical, and interactional approaches to the analysis of prosody, as well as model prosodic analyses of the major research areas in discourse analysis. MES is a thorough presentation of how prosodic analysis can inform discourse analysis, unique in its coverage of material, excellence of presentation, and theoretical and analytical depth.

This is the first textbook on metaphor to appear after the cognitive linguistic revolution of metaphorical research launched two decades ago by Lakoff & Johnson with their pioneering work, Metaphors we live by. Much scholarship has since been devoted to this paradigm of research. Twenty years have passed, and Kövecses takes this as a good time to summarize the development of the field. Writing a textbook on metaphor certainly reflects the maturation of the study of metaphor within the cognitive linguistic tradition. Targeted readers are undergraduate and graduate students with interests in metaphor and cognitive linguistics. Experienced researchers may also find this book helpful in motivating new ideas.