This volume makes available to us a revised and expanded collection of essays originally published in 1992 as a special issue of the journal Pragmatics. In a masterful and greatly expanded introduction to the volume, Kathryn Woolard establishes the parameters of a field that seeks to advance the goal of linking work on language structure with that on language politics, as well as with linguistic and social theory more generally.

Linguists who teach introductory courses in their discipline routinely encounter the nonlinguists' knowledge, or lack of it, about language. Their students are fairly predictable in their ignorance of basic linguistic concepts: For example, they typically believe that there in one standard dialect of English, that a word's true meaning has little to do with its current usage, and that nonstandard dialects are primitive languages. In fact, teachers of introductory courses in linguistics realize that their principal responsibility is to correct the many and common misperceptions about language that prevail their culture. In most respects, Folk linguistics is a systematic study of these misperceptions.

Debating diversity, a pragmatic analysis of official liberal discourse concerning migration in Flemish Belgium, is a thorough, topical, and relevant treatment of the widespread yet near-invisible forms of racism that pervade public discourse on cultural difference. Electing not to focus on the far more widely recognized phenomenon of right-wing racism, the authors instead offer a careful critique that makes clear that the left is by no means immune to racism in its policies and practices. Following in the wake of research by a number of other politically oriented discourse analysts, this volume addresses how racism manifests itself in discourse. It therefore serves as an important reminder that ideologies are constructed, and hence contingent and changeable. Because of the broad scope of its inquiry and the relatively accessible methods it employs, it will be of interest to scholars in many fields, including anthropology, communication, political science, race and ethnic studies, and sociology, as well as linguistics. Despite its sometimes overwhelming wealth of detail, it may also appeal to a nonacademic readership, as did the Dutch version of the book when it was first published in Belgium.

The 15 articles in this book focus on the evaluation of competence in clinical, educational, and other contexts in which people are regularly judged as incompetent. Several focus on interactions involving adults and children with communication disorders; others present issues of competence and incompetence in foreign-language learning, educational assessment, the discussion of medical diagnoses between medical staff and clients, and psychotherapy sessions. Although there is no single prevailing research methodology used throughout, a consistent theme is that competence and incompetence are socially constructed within interaction, and that the evaluation of (in)competence is central to the creation and negotiation of social identity in everyday life.

Deborah Cameron's Good to talk is excellent: an innovative and insightful analysis of what she terms “communication culture” in Britain. With a few changes, it also works for the United States. Cameron analyzes how it happened and what it means that “a commonplace social activity has been transformed into a technical skill, with its own professional experts and its own technical jargon” (p. 2) – i.e., that talk has become technicized as communication. She asks two sets of questions. First, what are the ways in which people are encouraged or required to talk, what are these norms of talk, and who has established them? Second, why codify and regulate talk in these ways, and why has communication come to be seen as causal? By addressing these questions, she gives new direction to the literature on ideologies of English, beyond the examination of linguistic form and correctness issues.

The book under review is the most comprehensive introduction to discourse analysis that I have ever read. It consists of seven chapters and an appendix, covering a wide range of both macro and micro issues related to discourse analysis.

In The grammar of autobiography, Jean Quigley makes a claim that one often hears nowadays: that the self is constructed in autobiographical narrative discourse. Two dimensions of the work distinguish her analysis of narrative self-construction from many other treatments of the subject. First, she offers a genuinely interdisciplinary account, drawing on functional linguistics, theoretical and developmental psychology, and accounts of language development. Second, she studies a particular category of linguistic forms – modals – as the key to narrative self-construction.

As Verschueren writes in his preface, this book is an attempt to meet a double challenge: (a) to present a coherent theory of pragmatics, describing research to date and setting parameters for future research; and (b) to serve as a textbook that is accessible to all students with a basic linguistics background. This is no easy task, but Verschueren has managed to write a book that is accessible to the nonspecialist student and also provides a valuable synthesis of the pragmatic perspective for language specialists in a variety of disciplines. Most chapters have detailed summaries and are followed by suggestions for future research and additional reading.

This is the inaugural volume of a new series, Studies in Language and Gender. This substantial book is an edited collection of recent research in the field of language and gender, predominantly but not exclusively focused on language use in the United States. The research represented in its 20 chapters is wide-ranging, both in terms of the genres and media explored in them and in terms of analytic approaches. The genres, media, and locations investigated include, among others, American shopping channel talk (Mary Bucholtz), self-revelatory on-line journals (Laurel Sutton), office interaction (Deborah Tannen), Latina hopscotch in Los Angeles (Marjorie Goodwin), Irish-language community radio (Colleen Cotter), British teenage girls' conversations (Jennifer Coates), and a Tunisian sociolinguistic interview (Keith Walters).

One of the reasons why the area of language and emotion attracts many of us lies in the continuing endeavor – whether implicitly or explicitly conducted – to overcome our own persistent assumptions concerning such dichotomies as nature vs. culture, individuality vs. society, and emotion vs. cognition. In other words, our focus on language and its constitutive role in the creation of what seems to be so “natural” and “individual” has led to the deconstruction of our own epistemology, as well as contributing to our better understanding of how people's emotive meanings are situated in the midst of complex social relations and interactions. Languages of sentiment can be located within this long intellectual engagement. Although its contributors particularly explore Asian languages of sentiment, illustrated by Tamil, Bangla, Javanese, Japanese, and Tagalog cases, the aim of the book is not to essentialize “the” Asian sentiment. Instead, all the chapters try to capture the pragmatics of language and emotion that interact with global politics as well as with local social relations and interactions.

This is a great book. In it, Shuy describes some of the applied linguistics consultancy work he has undertaken in the past twenty years, mostly involving legal cases and public institutions in the US. He sets out to show how linguistics is a valuable tool in the analysis of bureaucratic language, in the hopes that that through this, “the intersection of law and linguistics may be furthered” (x), and that more fellow linguists will become involved in similar consultancy. Shuy gives a clear exposition not only of what he and colleagues have done but also of how they have negotiated working relationships. He is particularly strong on the ethics of consultancy, and his clear exposition of how the consultancy relationship should be set up merits attention from people well beyond the area of language study. Shuy's case studies and ethical points would be good preliminary reading for students undertaking language project work (for more on ethics, see BAAL 1994).

Well known for its creation and adoption of modern Hebrew as its national language, Israel is still one of the most linguistically heterogeneous societies in the world. Bernard Spolsky and Elana Shohamy delve into this complex reality and describe a coherent picture of it, drawing from an updated model of linguistic policy which they elaborate. I found no few weaknesses in the book in regard to the sociological interpretation of sociolinguistic facts, but its major interest resides in the description of Israel's linguistic diversity and evolution. It is one of the very few attempts to date to do that, and it merits attention.

This is a collection of studies of identity in the framework of Conversation Analysis. Many of the essays make explicit use of Harvey Sacks's descriptions of the “membership categorization devices” by which people construct attributions of identity in the course of interaction, as a way of accomplishing particular, situated goals. Many mount explicit arguments against psychological accounts of personal identity and social categorization according to which people bring preexisting identities into interactions. With one or two exceptions, the contributions are well argued, clearly written, and free of the jargon that sometimes makes work in Conversation Analysis inaccessible to outsiders. Readers of Language in Society should find the collection thought-provoking.

In a time when some scholars are bemoaning an apparent drop in attention to the role of ideology in legal settings, Philips's new book comes as a welcome intervention. The author uses fine-grained analysis of courtroom language to reveal the pervasive influence of ideology on trial court judges' practices. Followers of Philips's pioneering work on legal language will not be disappointed; the volume lives up to the exacting standard she set for the field in her early articles on courtroom (and classroom) discourse. The study uses discourse analysis of guilty pleas in an Arizona criminal court to uncover how wider social-structural and political divisions are affecting the administration of justice – a process mediated by ideology and enacted in the minute details of linguistic exchanges.

Andrea de Jorio's rich and precocious La Mimica, written in 1832, is now translated and set into a larger context by Adam Kendon. Highlighted by Kendon's introduction and footnotes, this refurbished work offers us a unique and valuable insight into a perspective on language and culture that prevailed during an era when national interests were directing a new kind of attention to both.

In this excellent study of guided tours through two Israeli kibbutz museums, Tamar Katriel comments that for her, “tracing the construction of Israeli culture is as much an act of recognition as it is one of deconstruction” (p. 116). Katriel, a native Israeli Jew, is telling us that for her, moving through these museums, looking at the exhibits, and listening to the guides is an emotional experience. The recognition of which Katriel writes is, one may say, that moment of connectivity in which one orients oneself to person, space, and time in ways that evoke (perhaps suddenly) an awareness that is related to one's very sense of self. The intersection of person, space, and time creates place and the emotions associated with it. When these moments of intersection occur in museums, the practice of taking objects out of their native contexts and infusing them with the purpose of presence within exhibits is successful. The purpose of guides in these museums is to create this sense of place within the people who visit these sites, to engender recognition within these visitors, even if they know little or nothing of the representations that constitute exhibits. Creating the feeling-tones of place is at the heart of guiding in these museums; and the narration of representations is the primary medium through which recognition is evoked.

The Multiliteracies (ML) Project is a response by eleven prominent literacy researchers, known collectively as the New London Group (NLG), to changes associated with the end of the Cold War and the information economy.1 ML was conceived in 1994 at a meeting in New London, New Hampshire, US, and saw light with the publication of NLG 1996 in the Harvard Educational Review. With the appearance of the volume under review, we can now say that it is walking and has a promising future.

This volume is a highly detailed and thoughtful analysis of the language use of Spanish, Arabic, and Chinese speakers in one of the major cities of Australia, Melbourne. Bringing together census findings and other empirical data, this study addresses the issues of pluricentricity and language maintenance and language shift in an immigrant context. Australia, as one of the world's more successful countries in its national bilingual policy, has been a catalyst for local research in community languages. The present volume complements the earlier works of both authors, for instance, Clyne 1991 and Kipp 1981.

Yiddish has attracted more public and scholarly interest than any other Jewish language. There are a number of reasons: its thousand-year history as a Jewish internal vernacular for Ashkenazi Jews; the development during the 19th and 20th centuries of an important literature in the language; the bitterness of the struggle with Hebrew, in the first part of the 20th century, for status as a symbol of Jewish nationalism; the tragedy of the extermination of most of its speakers by the Nazis; and the pain of its suppression under Stalin. It is no doubt a sign that Yiddish is no longer being seen as a threat to Hebrew that the Israeli Knesset established and funded, three years ago, the Natzionale Instantz fur Yiddisher Kultur. The first activities of this Authority (a series of concerts, lectures, and other events) have just been announced, after a long leadership struggle that has reflected the complex politics of the movement.

Amara begins his study of language variation in Palestinian border villages in Israel and the West Bank with three main premises: (1) researchers have not paid enough attention to the sociolinguistics of what he calls “radical political situations,” of which the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is an example; (2) the connection between macro-sociolinguistic issues, such as language planning and language attitudes, and micro issues, such as variation in use of linguistic structures, has not been explored enough; and (3) socio-political events and changes affect (i.e., change) patterns of use of linguistic structures. On the third point, Amara predicts, “When a society is divided, we should expect to find a reflected linguistic division; when two societies share common cultural or political values, we should expect to find some reflection of this in their languages.” Amara sets out to investigate this prediction for three villages on the border between Israel and the West Bank. Two of the villages, Zalafa and Western Barta'a, are situated in the area of Israel called the “Little Triangle,” which designates an area that Jordan agreed to cede to Israel in the armistice agreement following the Arab–Israeli War of 1948. The armistice line drawn between Israel and Jordan in 1949 divided several Palestinian villages and cities, including Barta'a. The third village in Amara's study, Eastern Barta'a, is situated in the West Bank. Western and Eastern Barta'a were reunited in 1967, when Israel took control of the West Bank.