This article focuses on adolescents at an inner-London secondary school who are learning German rather reluctantly in a foreign language class, and then using the language to play around elsewhere. I argue that the language teacher's pedagogic methods turned the German lessons into relatively intense institutional rituals, and that the lessons provided symbolic and socio-emotional material that students subsequently inverted in a set of micro-ritual improvisations. There are some endemic problems of evidence in the argument that instructed German was connected to improvised Deutsch by cause-and-effect processes associated with ritual, but the discussion ends by affirming ritual's value as an analytic frame that can be applied both to institutional language learning and to historical shifts in classroom experience.

Identity-related accounts of language alternation among bilingual speakers have traditionally drawn on the social values of the languages involved in specific communities (Gumperz 1982, Myers-Scotton 1993). However, recently researchers have expressed reservation against this approach (Wootton and Sebba 1998, Li Wei 1998, 2002). Following from this, Gafaranga 2001 argues that, in order to account for the orderliness of language alternation, language preference (Auer 1984) must be seen as a membership categorization device (Sacks 1966, 1974). In developing his argument, Gafaranga draws on instances of ordinary everyday conversation among bilingual speakers. In this paper, we take Gafaranga's argument a step further and look at language alternation in first-time trilingual service encounters collected in the Barcelona area. The languages involved are Catalan, Castilian, and English. Analysis of these data reveals that, in addition to doing service-relevant tasks, participants accomplish “medium-related activities” (Gafaranga 2001) drawing on their various linguistic identities. Therefore, the analysis confirms the need to see linguistic identities as social identities in their own right.

This article explores one aspect of the many public protests surrounding the 1996 reform of German orthography: the first in a series of legal challenges, which was brought before the Federal Constitutional Court in May 1996. The first section begins by proposing how and why such protests can be usefully theorized in terms of Blommaert's (1999) concept of a “language ideological debate,” and then describes the historical background essential for an understanding of this legal dispute. The second section focuses on a critical analysis of the case brought against the reform, looking at the details of the challenge itself, together with the justification for its rejection by the Constitutional Court. The third section considers what this dispute can tell us about debates over the perceived origin of orthographic norms, with particular reference to the ideological relationship between individual, speech community, and (nation-)state. Finally, there is a brief summary of the way in which the matter was finally – albeit unsatisfactorily – resolved in 1998–1999.

This study investigates the generation and maintenance of multiple personal names in an Anglophone Creole-speaking community of Panama. Nearly every Afro-Panamanian resident of the island of Bastimentos has two given names, one Spanish-derived and the other Creole-derived. The Creole or “ethnic name” is virtually the exclusive name used locally for reference and address. It is argued that these ethnic names are preferred for reference and address because they reflexively define who members of this speech community are in terms of culture and ancestry. A typology of nicknames and pseudonyms as well as a brief cross-cultural presentation of multiple or alternative personal names is provided. Ethnic name usage in Bastimentos is discussed within an acts of identity framework.

The two volumes reviewed here thumb their noses at the 1866 ban by the Linguistic Society of Paris on publications concerning language origins – a ban imposed by those august guardians of public faith in linguistic science because of the disreputable, speculative, nonempirical character of language origins scholarship. Yet nose-thumbing has been on the rise in the past two decades, even alarmingly so. Why? Have we witnessed epochal new empirical or conceptual breakthroughs that would warrant the overturning of that sober 19th-century decision?

In this highly ambitious book, Glynn attempts to provide a description of both how the brain works and how it has developed. Taking an interdisciplinary approach (he is a physiologist by training), he relies on insights from a wide number of disciplines, including psychology, neurology, anthropology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, psychiatry, physiology, and even philosophy. He is interested in providing answers to some perennial and interconnected questions that relate to the mind: “What kind of thing is mind? What is the relation between our minds and our bodies and, more specifically, what is the relation between what goes on in our minds, and what goes on in our brains? How did brains and minds originate? Can our brains be regarded as nothing more than exceedingly complicated machines? Can minds exist without brains” (p. 4). Although his arguments are rather technical, the book is intended for a nonscientist audience.

A major theme of this collection (which first appeared as an issue of Pragmatics, vol. 5, no. 2, 1995; the new publication includes revisions) is the concept of the public sphere, as this stems from early work by Habermas (1989 [1962]). However, the Habermasian notion of the public sphere as a category of bourgeois culture (denoting the site for the emergence of free rational discourse among individuals uncoerced by state-institutional structures) constitutes only one rubric of the thematic unity of the work under review. Contributors to the volume, in addition to being critical of Habermas's opus, continue an earlier concern in linguistic anthropology with a constructionist perspective on languages and publics, on the one hand, and the significance of reflexivity in the very practice of the field, on the other. In these two interrelated respects, the volume is an important contribution to our understanding of how concepts of languages are invented, constructed, and negotiated in historical, power-loaded contexts that also provide for a parallel construction of multiple public spheres.These spheres are partial and skewed, and, most of the time, they operate in such a way that mystifying ideological discourses take over the task of legitimating and institutionalizing inclusions and exclusions, while pretending to speak for all, or to present linguistic entities as natural products having little, if anything, to do with human agency and invested interests.

Bilingual speech takes research on code-mixing a step further toward achieving a better understanding of the differences in what in the past has been referred to simply as the mixing of two languages in the sentence (or intrasentential code-switching). In addition, Muysken presents the state of the discipline of language contact in the year 2000 from the perspective of the grammar and structure of language contact phenomena. He brings together and analyzes an extensive set of language pairs from a wide variety of communities and social contexts. Good familiarity with such varied multilingual data provides the author with a strong base on which to support his three-way classification (insertion, alternation, and congruent lexicalization) of code-mixing phenomena at the sentence level.

This is an impressive, fascinating, and exasperating work of scholarship, based on an astonishingly exhaustive survey of manuscript codices produced in the British Isles and western continental Europe between the 7th and the 13th centuries. Saenger traces the transition from continuous to word-divided script, which, he contends, reflects a fundamental shift in style from reading aloud to reading silently.

This statement is an opening point for the discussion on the effects of the dominance of English as a language of science on other languages and speech communities. The global search for a common auxiliary language that allows unprecedented possibilities for international cooperation, and the resulting prevalence and dominance of English in science, vary in kind and degree, as well as in effects, across language communities and countries. The volume under review is an outstanding one with respect to both thematic diversity and depth of analysis in most of its essays. Since Fishman et al. 1977 edited the first collection of essays on the spread of English, numerous valuable books on the status of English as a global language have been published (Flaitz 1988, Doyle 1989, Kachru 1992, Pennycook 1994, Hartmann 1996, Fishman et al. 1996, Crystal 1997, Ryan & Zuber-Skerritt 1999), but there is no doubt that Ulrich Ammon has edited an extremely innovative and insightful volume.

As eighth-grade students of English in a “periphery” community school in India, we were assigned to discuss and to appreciate a piece of prose, from our textbook, called “On not answering the telephone”; it was a satirical piece demonizing telephones because their existence and use flouted all tenets of British English linguistic etiquette. None of us in that class had a phone in our homes, and none of us had any desire to learn the alien etiquette. We were interested only in learning the language to the extent that it could help us realize our immediate and, perhaps, future goals. This was our tacit response, and resistance, to English linguistic imperialism: awareness of the pragmatic rewards of English-language acquisition and use, but negation and denial of the cultural hegemony of English. This dynamic of ideological imposition and resistance (and appropriation) forms the core of Canagarajah's book, Resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching.

A brief editors'note about the title of this book begins with the following statement: “The title of this volume is an answer to another publication, the UNESCO Red Book on endangered languages.” It ends by making a vow: “We hope this Green Book will be of use to everyone who wants it to be no longer necessary for their language to be listed in the Red Book.

“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.

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.

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.

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.