Leon Rappoport, Punchlines: The case for racial, ethnic, and gender humor. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005. Pp. xv, 181. Hb $44.95.

Written in a student-friendly style, Punchlines examines the state and development of racial, ethnic, and gender humor in the contemporary United States. The social psychologist Leon Rappoport's main objective is to save the reputation of this kind of humor from its “politically correct” critics. Specifically, Rappoport sets out to debunk two pieces of criticism: that this type of humor is inherently prejudiced against minorities, and that it contributes to anti-minority prejudice in society. The author argues that humor cannot be the automatic vehicle of prejudice because its reception is inevitably context-dependent. Different audiences react differently to the same words at different points in history. Also, racial, ethnic, and gender humor is widely performed and enjoyed by members of minorities. As to the second piece of criticism, Rappoport hypothesizes that this kind of humor, the often outrageous comedy of performers like Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor, renders intergroup hatred ludicrous and thus contributes to the destruction of prejudice and the decline of the significance of ethnicity in America. Ethnic humor immerses increasingly sophisticated mass audiences in the risky but entertaining and cathartic mud bath of human folly (racism, homophobia, misogyny) and then has them emerge cured from their own prejudices and hypocrisy.

Ronald Wardhaugh, An introduction to sociolinguistics. 5th ed. Oxford & Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. Pp. 418. Pb $41.95.

Wardhaugh's textbook has been one of the most popular ones in sociolinguistics for two decades. Its fifth edition was published in 2006, four years after the fourth and 20 years after the first. The 16 chapters are divided as follows: 1, introduction; 2, languages, dialects and varieties; 3, pidgins and creoles; 4, codes; 5, speech communities; 6, 7, and 8, variation and change; 9, words and culture; 10, ethnographies; 11, solidarity and politeness; 12, talk and action; 13, gender; 14, disadvantage; 15, planning; 16, conclusion. The coverage of sociolinguistic subjects is broad: multilingualism and its consequences, regional and social dialectology.

Geneva Smitherman, Word from the mother: Language and African Americans. New York: Routledge, 2006. Pp. xiii, 172. Hb $80.00.

Intended for specialists and general readers alike, this book draws upon linguistics and cultural studies to describe African American Language (AAL). Smitherman details the linguistic, cultural, and social forces AAL is both embedded in and embeds.

Emi Morita, Negotiation of contingent talk: The Japanese interactional particles ne and sa. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. xvi, 240. Hb $138.00.

The large category of Japanese words or morphemes commonly labeled “particles,” or in Japanese joshi, has long been problematic for linguistics. This in large part is due to the variety of apparent grammatical or pragmatic functions the category encompasses. While some particles seem to function as more or less straightforward postpositions, others are said to mark case or discourse functions, and still others have pragmatic functions but no clearly agreed syntactic or semantic position. The two particles tackled by Emi Morita's new book, ne and sa, are of this last variety. Morita argues that these “interactional particles” serve important roles of marking stance or activity in ongoing talk-in-interaction. As Morita puts it, “The insertion of interactional particles may serve to ‘salientize’ or ‘set apart’ certain units of talk in order to make them interactionally relevant to immediately adjacent action” (p. 95).

Stephen J. Caldas, Raising bilingual-biliterate children in monolingual cultures. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2006. Pp. xvi, 231. Pb. $39.95.

This is the fascinating story of the author's own family project of raising his three children French-English bilingually in English-speaking Louisiana. Caldas, a French-English bilingual himself, and his bilingual French-Canadian wife artificially orchestrate and manipulate the children's environments from birth to adolescence to ensure that the children develop full bilingual proficiency and biliteracy in French and English. Caldas's and his wife's main strategy is to speak only French to their son and their identical twin daughters. They also commit to use only French with each other, thus creating an all-French-speaking home environment. The Caldases also enroll the children in French immersion school and make extensive use of French-language media to further expose the children to French. Finally, the author and his wife purchase a cottage in Quebec where they spend the summers, providing the children with authentic societal language immersion. The outcome of this extraordinary experiment is that, by adolescence, all three children are completely bilingual and biliterate in French and English and can be easily mistaken as native speakers of both Quebecois French and American English.

Miyako Inoue, Vicarious language. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006. Pp. xi, 323. Pb $24.95.

Japanese Women's Language (JWL) is not a new topic of research in the social sciences, but Miyako Inoue's Vicarious language is an original contribution to the field. According to Inoue, women's language references linguistic forms distinguishing the speech of women and brings with it certain connotations of “femininity” such as politeness or nonassertiveness. In line with other current research, Inoue asserts that JWL is not part of the linguistic repertoires of many women.

Terttu Nevalainen & Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, Historical sociolinguistics: Language change in Tudor and Stuart England (Longman Linguistics Library). London: Pearson Education, 2003. Pp. xvi, 266.

Historical sociolinguistics is another outcome of the long-term endeavor by Terttu Nevalainen and Helena Raumolin-Brunberg, from the English Department at the University of Helsinki, to “put sociolinguistics to the test of time” (p. 202) by reconstructing the English language in some of its social and historical contexts, here in the Tudor and Stuart periods (Early Modern English). This enterprise has also allowed the authors to refine the methodology of historical sociolinguistics: first by confronting both the fragmentary nature of historical materials and the difficulties of socially reconstructing the past – the “bad data problem,” in the words of Labov – and second by looking for the solutions afforded by ancillary disciplines like corpus linguistics and social history. In fact, the authors' research is built, on the one hand, upon the Corpus of Early English correspondence, a collection of personal letters (nearly 2.7 million words from 1410 to 1681) compiled specifically for historical sociolinguistic research, which ensures the reliable reconstruction of both linguistic and extralinguistic variables, as well as the commonsense use of the findings of social history, which facilitates access to period-specific information in the process of reconstructing the sociohistorical circumstances that may have affected linguistic variation and change in the past. Corpus linguistics and social history, in the view of Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg, scientifically legitimate historical sociolinguistics by conferring upon it “empirical” and “historical” validity.

Harald Weinrich, The linguistics of lying and other essays. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005, Pp. vii, 148. Pb. $18.95.

This book examines the nature of lying by considering the correlation between language and thought, language and reality, and language and context. In the five essays included, Weinrich relies on literary and philosophical works from Aristotle to Zola to propose his argument that linguistics can examine how language hides thoughts and how truth becomes distorted into lie. He weaves a sophisticated philosophy of the ways in which language is true or untrue, and the mechanisms of linguistics, literature, and life that signal these truths or untruths.

Publications received (through 11 July 2006).

Fred Genesee, Katheryn Lindholm-Leary, William M. Saunders, and Donna Christian (eds.), Educating English language learners: A synthesis of research evidence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. x, 245. Pb $24.99.

Educating English language learners appeared as a result of a U.S. government-funded project in an attempt to synthesize “research on the relationship among oral language, literacy, and academic achievement for English language learners (ELLs) in the United States” (1). Referring to what Donna Christian calls “educational facts” (1) about the lower academic ability of students with limited English proficiency, and placing institutionalized academic achievement at the center of their discussions, the contributors review three databases and a number of journals of language and education. They explore research trends in the education of English as a second language in the past 20 years, how research findings have been applied in U.S. schools, and possible future research directions.

Laada Bilaniuk, Contested tongues: Language politics and cultural correction in Ukraine. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 230. Pb $ 24.95, Hb. $59.95.

This is a comprehensive ethnographic study of an immensely complex language situation in the post-Soviet Ukraine. Bilaniuk discusses subtle matters, such as language ideologies, the struggle over status, compromise strategies, and highly stigmatized mixed varieties called surzhik, in a manner that makes the book accessible to nonspecialists in the field of sociolinguistics.

This issue revives the “Book Notes” section. Book notes are 500-word reports that summarize new books that may be of interest to some readers of Language in Society. This format will mean that more of the books we receive can be reviewed. Book notes are assigned to people who volunteer, and advanced graduate students are welcome to write book notes with a faculty member's supervision. Anyone interested in writing a book note should contact Jennifer Andrus at langsoc@cambridge.org for a list of available books. Books that are of general interest to Language in Society readers will still be considered for full critical reviews, which I will continue to commission. Readers should keep in mind that unsolicited reviews or book notes are rarely accepted. If there is a book you would like to review, please contact me first, at the same address.

Thomas E. Murray and Beth Lee Simon (eds.), Language variation and change in the American Midland: A new look at ‘Heartland’ English. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2006. Pp. ix, 319. Hb $165.

The editors of this volume have brought together an excellent collection of original essays that discuss issues of importance in the accounting of language patterns in American English and, in particular, in the definition of the “Midland” as a dialect area. As Simon states in an introductory piece, “The scrutiny given Midland dialect here raises fundamental issues regarding the basic notion of dialect and, consequently, how we theorize patterns of language variation” (p. xi). The essays present the results of empirical work using modern methodologies that incorporate statistical, archival, ethnographic, and textual investigations. These studies provide a fairly comprehensive picture of the Midland and its speakers, but they go beyond this to provide insight into the dynamics of language change and geosocial patterns .

Publications received through 5 November 2006.

Alison Sealey and Bob Carter, Applied linguistics as social science. New York: Continuum, 2004. Pp. xv, 239. Pb $49.95.

Applied linguistics as social science underscores the essential association between language and society and attempts “to make a case for regarding the discipline of applied linguistics as a social science” (1). Although Sealey and Carter are not bringing up the issue for the first time (despite the impression that the book seems to be giving), highlighting and reiterating the social and cultural nature of language in general and applied language studies in particular could be considered the major contribution of the book.

Kory Floyd, Communicating affection: Interpersonal behaviour and social context. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xiv, 222. Hb $80.00

Kory Floyd sets out to establish a comprehensive theory of affectionate communication. The text discusses the bioevolutionary and sociocultural paradigms of affectionate communication as well as related empirical knowledge in order to present a thorough theory of the subject at hand. At the outset, considering the complexity and wide-ranging nature of the phenomena of communication and affection, the task appears to be overwhelmingly ambitious. However, through detailed and well-outlined argumentation, the author manages to delineate an interesting and thought-provoking framework for future research.

Ana Celia Zentella (ed.), Building on strength: Language and literacy in Latino families and communities. New York: Teachers College Press, 2005. Pp. 224. Pb $23.95.

The 11 essays in Zentella's edited volume investigate language socialization practices of U.S. Latinos and together make possible a conceptualization of Latino language and literacy that resists “a view of Latino parents as monolithic and unconcerned about education” (p. 3). In her introduction, Zentella briefly traces the history of language socialization research and introduces the framework that undergirds the volume.

Karim Murji and John Solomos (eds.), Racialization: Studies in theory and practice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 307. $39.95.

The 13 papers in this edited volume, written by noted scholars of race and ethnicity (mainly sociologists) from the United States and United Kingdom, center on racialization – the “processes by which racial meanings are attached to particular issues” (p. 3). In their introduction, Murji and Solomos consider the term's origins and evolution and briefly review the development of race theory.

Publications received.

Publications received (through 30 March 2007).