School students (15–16 years) in six regions of Wales were recorded telling stories in their local English dialects. Some of these narratives were used as samples representing the main English dialect regions in Wales. Comparable groups of students (n = 169) and a group of teachers (n = 47) rated the audio-recorded speakers on a number of scales of affiliation, status, and Welshness. Statistical analysis of their ratings, employing cluster analysis and multidimensional scaling, made it possible to detect some of the competing or additive effects of dialect and narrative features. Judgments of “Welshness” of the speaker/narratives were grounded in the regional dialect properties; but other judgments, such as the likability of the speakers, tended to draw on features of both dialect and narrative. In addition, comparison of students and teachers revealed differences in their evaluations of particular dialect communities and the characteristics of the narratives. The findings illustrate the importance of approaching the analysis of dialect variation within the broader context of speech and discourse performance.

This study, drawing on data from a large sociolinguistic interview corpus for three Acadian communities of Atlantic Canada, concerns codeswitches involving verbs of opinion or belief (e.g. guess, think, imagine, believe) in French-English bilingual discourse. The codeswitch itself serves to underscore the speaker's stance as to the truth of the proposition – and, in some cases, to indicate a degree of uncertainty not nuanced by corresponding French language forms. Variation in usage is related to intensity of language contact at the levels of the community and of the individual.

Drawing on data gathered during fieldwork in an Indo-Guyanese village (1994–96), this article shows that the gender patterns for variable pronominal usage are strikingly stable over time. In both this study and one conducted by John Rickford more than twenty years ago, women, compared with men, use more basilectal variants in the category of 1sg. subject (mi vs. ai), but fewer in the category of 3sg. objects (am vs. shi/ii/it). Rather than explain this variation as a “leveling out” (Rickford 1979), it is here suggested that variants must be understood in terms of their contribution to an unfolding interactional engagement. The conclusion remarks on the continuing confusion among sociolinguists regarding the analytical relevance of gender as an external constraint on variation. A more developed understanding of these issues depends on recognizing the way in which language variation serves as an indirect and constitutive index of gender.

The first goal of this article is to present a description of the linguistic features that distinguish the genderlects of Russian. Although there exist some data on interruptions and other kinds of gender-specific discourse behavior in Russian, they are not discussed here, because the variables that govern gender differences in linguistic behavior are too numerous and inconclusive, and Russian data that bear on such behavior remain at this point too meager. Rather, what is discussed here are the structural features of Russian genderlects. This focus leads to a second goal, a theoretical one: to explore how genderlect phenomena can be explained in the Transactional Discourse Model (TDM), a broadly generative, pragmatically based discourse model that is sensitive to the factors that control the occurrence of gender-specific features in speech.

With the death of Charles Albert Ferguson (“Fergie” to his friends, colleagues, and students) on September 2, 1998, in Palo Alto, California, at the age of seventy-seven, the field of sociolinguistics lost a scholar of unusual depth, breadth, integrity, and kindness.

Almost forty years ago, the “Whorf Hypothesis” was one of the things that attracted me to linguistic anthropology. George Orwell's 1984, with its dark vision of a world made safe for power by bureaucratic euphemism, was one of my favorite books, and Whorf's claim that novel and valuable ways of understanding the world might be encoded in small stateless languages struck me as a particularly telling and precise statement of a large anthropological commitment. But my own Whorfianism, and everybody else's as well, was soon to be seriously challenged. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, new scholarship on language universals and linguistic typology undercut the theory of linguistic relativity. Whorf's own best-known descriptive claims, especially those about Hopi, were challenged by knowledgeable field workers (Voegelin et al. 1979, Malotki 1983). By the early 1990s, Steven Pinker could confidently write that Whorfianism was “wrong, all wrong” (1994:57), “outlandish” (63), and “bunk” (65) – and this is a mere subsample of Pinker's characterizations.

This book is the first in a series, edited by Stephen Levinson, which (according to the dust jacket) “focuses on the role that language, in both its universal psychological aspects and its variable cultural aspects, plays in human cognition ... [as well as] the relation of speech production and comprehension to other kinds of behavior in cultural context.” Each chapter focuses on one point of contact between linguistic and conceptual representation. Since the goal of the series is of central concern to readers of LiS, the first book in the series should be especially interesting, as a harbinger of relevant studies to come.

Simply put, MacLaury's new book on color terminology systems in a hundred Mexican and Central American languages is a groundbreaking study on how the human mind apprehends the physical universe; it is by far the most important work on color nomenclature theory to appear in the past thirty years. M's insights, which are the culmination of some two decades of fieldwork and analysis, will be of tremendous value to linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists of many different backgrounds and interests.

What is alloglottography? A diaeresis? A digamma? Whose writing system has kanamajiri writing and kokuji? How would you start to find any of these in a conventional writing system text/reference, unless you knew where (in the world) to start? What about opisthograph, ostracon, quoc-ngu, and tugra? None are in the index of Daniels & Bright 1996, which I consider the best book to date on the world's writing systems. But all are entries, cross-referenced to other entries, in Coulmas's Encyclopedia. The reader can also look up Bamum writing, Djuka syllabic writing, the Hatrene script, Hsi-hsia writing, the Loma syllabary, Peguan script, Tifinagh, Urartian writing, and the Wolof alphabet directly, without having first to know what set of writing systems, geographical or typological, they belong to. My personal favorite is Sogdian writing (471–74), an Aramaic-derived script used by Persian colonists in Chinese Turkestan; the cursive form of this writing system is attributed to Ahriman the devil, because it is so hard to distinguish the letters. What a pleasant surprise, for one satiated with discussions of the weaknesses and unnecessary complexities of Japanese writing!

The central idea that informs Macaulay's book is aptly expressed in a passage he quotes from Sapir (1929:214):

Language is primarily a cultural or social product and must be understood as such ... It is peculiarly important that linguists, who are often accused, and accused justly, of failure to look beyond the pretty patterns of their subject-matter, should become aware of what their science may mean for the interpretation of human conduct in general. (138)

It's tough to review an interior volume of a continuing, multivolume work like DARE, especially when previous volumes (1, 1985; 2, 1991) have been so thoroughly reviewed and so well received – and when many readers of LiS may already be familiar with the series. Reviewers of the first volume could comment on the history of DARE, its goals and methodologies, the unique problems encountered during its development along with their solutions, and its innovations – such as the clever maps which still give a recognizable US, though skewed according to population density. Reviewers of the final volume will be able to look back over the entire series, casting a critical eye on the overall success of the endeavor and evaluating its success as a work of scholarship. Nevertheless, I will do my best to concentrate on the volume at hand, although some glances forward and backward are inevitable.

For readers who are interested in learning how and why speakers select among competing language varieties, Goldstein's critical ethnography of immigrant factory workers in Toronto provides compelling documentation. She was employed as an on-site teacher of English as a Second Language (ESL) at Stone Specialities, a manufacturing company that hired large numbers of Portuguese-speaking workers from the Azores. The workplace ESL classes were less successful than expected, so she undertook an in-depth ethnographic study to determine why.

Fifty years after the nations of South Asia gained their independence from Britain, the language of the colonialists remains very much alive in the region. In fact, in some respects it is even more alive than at the time of departure – as witnessed by the efflorescence of South Asian writers in English of international stature, to the extent that the New Yorker has devoted the major part of an issue to them (June 23–30, 1997).

This book reminds us that code-switching is not only a classic topic, but also an important and highly challenging one. In distinction from previous studies, this work reveals that a bilingual community of second-generation Japanese Canadians (Niseis), in Toronto, has three distinct types of bilingual speech: a basically Japanese variety, a basically English variety, and a mixed variety. Nishimura analyzes these three bilingual speech varieties and provides an answer to the fundamental question in code-switching: “Who speaks what language to whom, and on what occasions?” That is, this research ascribes the motivation of this variability to the “intended audience.” These Niseis choose the basically Japanese variety when they speak to native Japanese people; when they speak to fellow Niseis who have always lived in Canada, they choose the basically English variety; and when they speak to a group comprising both native Japanese and Niseis, they use the mixed variety, oscillating between Japanese and English. They switch among these codes even in the middle of storytelling. What is important here, for the bilingual speakers, is to address two questions: “Who is present in the audience of the ongoing conversational situation?”; and more specifically, “To whom is the current production of this utterance directed?”

One mainstay of the Boasian tradition in anthropological linguistics is the notion that adequate documentation of a language must consist of at least three volumes: a grammar, a dictionary, and a collection of texts. This convention grew out of Boas's dogged insistence on the collection of copious texts in the native languages as a way of documenting the cultures of Native North Americans, which he believed were breaking down and disappearing. Obviously, if one were actually to make use of such texts, a grammar and a dictionary were also needed; so this practice of a necessary trilogy was established, a tradition that has continued in academic departments which carry on the Boasian heritage (illustrated by the postgraduate work and resulting publications of the editor of this journal).

This slender, neatly typeset volume contains a selection of the papers presented at an international three-day workshop on creole languages and language acquisition, held at the University of Leiden in 1990. Entitled “The logical problem of language acquisition,” the workshop set out to investigate the acquisition of parts of the grammar by children and adults. The purpose of the Leiden gathering was to bring together linguists from essentially two fields (language acquisition theory and pidgin/creole studies) in order to “solve the ‘logical problem of language acquisition’ from as many perspectives as possible” (p. 6).1 The central issue examined during the workshop was whether the specific circumstances of the genesis of a creole language have implications for theories of language acquisition in general. Conversely, the organizers and participants hoped that their discussions would shed new light on the early history of existing creole languages.

Preston's Preface identifies a gaping hole in the domain of SLA research: a “relative neglect ... of the insights to be gained from the quantitative study of interlanguage variation” (p. xiv). The book is intended to remedy that defect by providing (a) a clear rationale for the use of quantitative sociolinguistic methods to study interlanguage variation; (b) seven exemplary studies which use multivariate analysis of linguistic variation for this purpose; and (c) a practical, step-by-step manual on how to use VARBRUL computer programs to analyze variable interlanguage data. Readers of this book should come away with a very clear idea of why and when this sort of analysis should be done, and how to use this powerful tool in analyzing their own data.

This volume, containing some 30,000 entries, takes its place as one of the most sophisticated and comprehensive dictionaries ever prepared for an American Indian language; indeed, it is among the best dictionaries available for any language of the world, and a model for future lexicographers of “neglected” languages. The editorial team – including Hill, Emory Sekaquaptewa, Mary E. Black, Ekkehart Malotki, and the late Michael Lomatuway'ma – compiled the work in consultation with a large team of elder Hopi speakers from the westernmost Third Mesa (the villages of Oraibi, Kykotsmovi, Hotevilla, Bacavi, and Moencopi). Entries include information on inflection, definitions, examples (often illustrating aspects of Hopi culture), etymologies, and synonymy, as in the following sample entry:

(1) kyàasom|ta (∼tota)vn.p. cook creamed corn. Hakim tùupeptote' mit pay hingsavàwyat hakim poyot akw ang sispayangwu; pu' hak ∼tangwu; kyasmi pamningwu. When they roast sweet corn in the pit oven, they scrape the kernels off the very short ears and cook them by boiling; that is creamed corn. kyàasom-ta [creamed:corn-caus] Syn. kyàasomkwiva.

Malayalam, a member of the Dravidian family, is the official language of Kerala state in southwest India. Asher is an experienced Dravidianist of Edinburgh University, as well as editor-in-chief of the Encyclopedia of language and linguistics (10 vols., Oxford: Pergamon, 1994); his co-author is a native speaker of Malayalam, and a former professor at a college in Kerala.