Many linguists believe that the revitalization of moribund languages, where there may only be a handful of elderly fluent speakers left, is a noble – if perhaps nearly impossible – ideal for native communities involved in such work. Even more challenging is the reintroduction of a long-dead language such as the South Australian language Kaurna (pronounced [ga:na]), spoken on the Adelaide plains until the last native speaker, Ivaritji (a.k.a. Amelia Taylor), died in 1929. Rob Amery challenges the standards by which language revitalization programs are judged as successful, while giving us a step-by-step method for the reintroduction and revalorization of an extinct native tongue, which he calls the Formulaic Method. This detailed case study of what is, after all, just the beginning stages of Kaurna language revival will be of interest not just to linguists involved in the field, but especially to community members and other nonspecialists who are somehow connected with lesser-used languages and language revival efforts. Amery's work is also an important contribution to the emerging field of ecological linguistics and its application to language planning.

“Grammaticalization,” to quote what is probably the best known definition of the term, “consists in the increase of the range of a morpheme advancing from a lexical to a grammatical or from a less grammatical to a more grammatical status, e.g., from a derivative formant to an inflectional one” (Kuryłowicz 1965:69). As far as studies of grammaticalization in English are concerned, the history of the modals has been the focus of considerable attention in recent years. Manfred Krug's (K's) book is an important new contribution to this area of ongoing research.

The French in the United States offers valuable insight on processes of identity formation among French-born individuals living permanently in the US. The book's title foreshadows the ambiguity of how the French in America are defined in objective terms, as well as their subject positioning as members of an ethnic group. For instance, Lindenfeld cautions against relying on the criterion of ancestry used in census-based rankings to study the French presence in the United States, since census identification includes people of various national origins and does not distinguish the number of intervening generations since departure from France. The limitations of the native use of the French language as a valid indicator of direct French origin neglects the fact that native speakers of French who reside in the US often possess Canadian or Caribbean lineage. Although Lindenfeld does not say so directly, relying on native use of French to identify direct immigrants from France would equally exclude the possibility of identifying French citizens who do not speak French as their first language, as well as those who were raised speaking two or more languages. Another concern raised in the book is the broad significance of the label “French American,” traditionally used to identify Americans of French ancestry, such as Cajuns in Louisiana. The designation currently enjoys a certain popularity among French immigrants because it offers a direct parallel with other immigrant groups, such as Italian Americans.

When the Yiddish atlas project was initiated in the late 1950s by Uriel Weinreich, the prevailing view was that Yiddish was born in the Rhineland in the 9th and 10th centuries when French and Italian Jews adopted and adapted German; it then expanded to the Judeo-Italian settlement in Bavaria and reached monolingual Slavic territory in the 13th century. This third volume (volumes 1–2, 1992, 1995), subtitled The Eastern Yiddish – Western Yiddish continuum, is predicated on the belief that Eastern Yiddish (spoken in central and eastern Europe) is a “colonial” offshoot of Western Yiddish, remnants of which survive in Holland, Alsace, and Switzerland. The 148 linguistic and cultural maps permit the exploration of many questions – including the continuum hypothesis itself; paradoxically, considerable data here seem to disconfirm the hypothesis. The occasional commentary, though not customary in most atlases, is very welcome, though more could have been presented, given the blank space on many pages.

This book consists of seven chapters; its main aim is “to apply certain theoretical insights into linguistic variation and change to the Spanish speaking world” (p. ix). The first three chapters are devoted to explaining fundamental concepts related to variation and change; the following three, to presenting the broad patterns displayed by geographical and social variation in Spanish; and the last, to the history of the standardization process of Spanish. From the beginning, Penny makes clear that he is not claiming to advance variationist theory, but he hopes that the data presented in the book will test and support such theoretical approach to language, which I understand he refers to in the sense of the quantitative paradigm. Similar disclaimers are made throughout the book regarding the unequal attention paid to the correlation between linguistic and sociological features of Spanish-speaking communities, given the paucity of data available.

The current issue inaugurates an increase in frequency for Language in Society, which will now appear five times a year. We will be able to publish more papers, and thus be able to reduce the amount of time that authors must wait to see their accepted papers in print. This time lag has recently been a year from acceptance (and has threatened to be as long as 18 months) and was difficult to reduce within the four-issue per year constraint given the high quality of our submissions. The new schedule will help cut the time from acceptance to appearance in a printed issue. It will also permit me to continue to be flexible about the length of papers, and will allow more flexibility to consider proposals for special issues.

Stevenson's & Theobald's volume, the outcome of a 1998 Southampton conference entitled Disunification: Competing constructions of contemporary Germany, is a rich and diverse collection of current sociolinguistic and discourse-analytic research into the German language. It aims to explore Germany's continued cultural and linguistic East/West divide, a decade after unification. The volume's 13 contributions are divided into two parts: critical discourse-analytic approaches to public discourses, and micro-analytic approaches to private or semi-public speech genres and communicative practices. The contributions in the first part are presented as “part of the analytical creation of … discourses” which seek to “punctur[e] the dominant western story, and by this very act, creating space for the expression of other memories, experiences and historiographies, and the emergence of alternative discourses” (p. 8). In contrast, the chapters in the second part have the more descriptive aim of documenting linguistic difference in East and West. The editors contend that “profound differences in communicative practices and behaviours between east and west Germans” exist, or are perceived to exist, and that these differences “constitute a significant barrier to the project of bringing a united … Germany into existence”.

This book is about variation in 16th-century Spanish between forms and patterns that triumphed and those “archaisms” that did not, with a focus on the latter. The goal is to investigate resistance to language change. Contrary to the widespread assumption that this was a period of rapid changes, Anipa shows the intricacies of persistent variation during the Golden Age, drawing on literary data and a novel source: the testimony of contemporaneous grammarians.

This fourth volume in the series “Language, Power and Social Process” is an excellent ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of youth culture in Barcelona. Joan Pujolar brings research on Catalan-Spanish bilingualism into the post-structuralist era without pretense or puffery. The book is a systematic exploration of bilingual practices in relation to the variable construction and performance of gender and class as well as ethnic identities. Drawing inspiration from Bakhtin, Pujolar has an acute – and, as far as I know, unerring – sensitivity to the voices of the Catalan context.

The relationship between language and the body has become an increasingly prominent area of research within linguistics and related disciplines. Some investigators of this question have examined how facts about the human body are encoded in linguistic structure, while others have explored the use of the body as a communicative resource in interaction. Surprisingly little, however, has been written about the role of language in constructing the body as a social object. In Fat talk, Mimi Nichter, a medical anthropologist, addresses this issue by examining the discourse of dieting among American teenage girls. Although language itself is not the center of the analysis, Nichter draws on a wide range of sociolinguistic research to investigate how the body is constructed through talk – a question that will be of equal interest to scholars of language, culture, and society.

Anita Puckett's Seldom ask, never tell is an important, long-needed work that enables us to conceptualize “Appalachian speech” not only in terms of dialect or traditional aesthetic resources, but also according to characteristic “ways of speaking” and the ideology of pragmatics that informs them. Building on Irvine's (1989) realization that “speech economy” is not merely a metaphor, Puckett has created a meticulous and insightful ethnography of the range of “requesting behaviors” that index and constitute the “socioeconomy” of a community in coalfield Appalachia.

This book makes an important contribution to understanding the complexity of the sources of power that govern Chinese politeness behavior in different settings. To answer the question of why Chinese seem to be inconsistent in their politeness behavior, the author conducted ethnographic research in southern China over a period of eight years in the 1990s. Through discourse analysis of data in both Cantonese and Mandarin, Pan describes Chinese politeness behavior across three social settings – business encounters, official meetings, and family gatherings – that represent a variety of situations and power structures. Taking into account the social factors of age, gender, rank, ingroup identity, and setting, Pan brings in the perspective of situational variation and looks at Chinese politeness practice in the larger framework of social context.

Geoffrey Lewis's book traces the history of Turkish language reform with fascinating style. The reader is provided with rich and well-selected examples, and the translation from Turkish to English is excellent. The author's experience of Turkey and his competence in Turkish are clear throughout. He states that the book has two purposes: to acquaint the general reader with the history of Turkish language reform, and to provide students at all levels of Turkish with some useful and stimulating reading matter. Lewis is successful on both counts. Furthermore, the book is significant in that it sheds light on the fact that, although language reform is not a well-known aspect of the Kemalist revolution, it played a vital role in the creation of the Turkish national identity. In other words, the aim of Turkish language reform was not simply to “purify” the language by eliminating foreign words and foreign grammatical features; rather, it was part of a nation-building project.

In Hiroko Tanaka, “Adverbials for turn projection in Japanese: Toward a demystification of the ‘telepathic’ mode of communication” (Language in Society 30:559–87), p. 580, next to last line, omiyari should read omoiyari.

Many linguists believe that the revitalization of moribund languages, where there may only be a handful of elderly fluent speakers left, is a noble (if not also nearly impossible) ideal for those native communities involved in such work; and this is not to mention the reintroduction of a long-dead language, such as the South Australian language Kaurna (pronounced [ga:na]), spoken on the Adelaide Plains until the last native speaker, Ivaritji (a.k.a. Amelia Taylor), died in 1929. Rob Amery challenges the standards by which language revitalization programs are judged as successful, while giving us a step-by-step method for the reintroduction and revalorization of an extinct native tongue, which he calls the Formulaic Method. This detailed case study of the beginning stages of Kaurna language revival will be of interest not just to linguists involved in the field, but especially to community members and other nonspecialists who are somehow connected with lesser-used languages and language revival efforts. Amery's work is also an important contribution to the emerging field of ecological linguistics and its application to language planning issues.

Studies of language erosion, especially erosion in the advanced stages, are hard to do, and they do not always make for light reading. In evaluating the findings, readers need to maintain a healthy distance between what the evidence actually shows and what they imagine it might show in a hypothetical other world. For bilingual educators, for example, understanding the course of language displacement is a part of our work that we have tended to neglect. Kendal King's investigation of the shift to Spanish in the Saraguro (Quichua-speaking) communities of southern Ecuador marks another advance in this important aspect of the study of bilingualism.