Book Reviews 2s5 seem to parallel the repeated triadic structure in a famous creation chant dating from 1886: "X [bird] copulated with Y [fish]: there issued forth Z [sun]." While Rongorongo makes only a modest beginning toward the decipherment of the Easter Island script no one who pursues this work in the future can proceed without consulting this remarkable work of prodigious scholarship. And scholars interested in other languages and scripts will find this book to be a veritable methodological Rosetta Stone. Post-Imperial English: Status Change in Former British and American Colonies, 1940-1990. Joshua A. Fishman, Andrew W. Conrad, and Alma Rubal-Lopez, eds. Contributions to the Sociology of Language, 72. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996.654 pp. JANINAFENIGSEN Brandos University Documenting the eclectic fortunes of English in 20 British and American former colonies and zones of influence, this collection seeks to explain the spread of English in the contemporary world, and to challenge the perspective identifying that process with imperialist encroachments. The scope is impressive in 21 chapters, introduction, and substantive conclusions, the contributors develop the themes originally charted by Fishman, Cooper, and Conrad (The Spread of English: The Sociology of English as an Additional Language, Rowley, MA: Newbury House, 1977), as well as attempt critically to engage more recent considerations of the language shift within a politically and critically informed framework. Two editorial queries have structured the contributions: one seeking to identify changes in the status of English in such domains as education, media, science, commerce, governmental operations, and informal usage; the other inviting the authors to respond to Robert Phillipson's (Linguistic Imperialism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992) approach to the spread of English as an imperialistic project. The case studies situated in settings as diverse as Papua New Guinea, Cameroon, Puerto Rico, Quebec, India, Sri Lanka, Mexico, and the European Union are, in my view, the most valuable contribution of the volume. In rich local detail, the studies depict a wealth of scenarios of the globe-wide fortunes of English. Al-Haq and Smadi show that in conservative Islamic circles in Saudi Arabia, the learning of English is considered instrumental in Islamic proselytizing and has become a religious duty. Mazrui and Mazrui detail how the dissimilar fates of English in Kenya and Uganda have stemmed from the synergies between the local inflections of British colonial policy and the distinct indigenous political systems. Tickoo tells the intriguing story of how the officially promoted English became an emblem 256 Journal of Linguistic Anthropology of a shared Singaporean identity. With fascinating political detail,, Veltman traces the deterioration of the status of Anglophone speakers in Quebec. Corona and Garcia show the process and mechanisms of the advancement of English in Cuba from a badge of a hostile foreign power to a treasured national resource. The remaining case studies span the Philippines (Sibayan and Gonzalez), Puerto Rico (Ramirez-Gonzalez and Torres-Gonzalez), the European Union (Ammon), South Africa (McLean and McCormick), Nigeria (Bamgbose), Tanzania (Yahya-Othman and Batibo), India (Raj Dua), Sri Lanka (Fernando), Papua New Guinea (Oladejo), Mexico (Hidalgo, Cifuentes, and Flores), Sudan (Wagi'alla), Cameroon (Chumbow and Bobda), Malaysia (Omar), and Israel (Spolsky). The studies show the complex political alignments of English—at times promoted, at times resisted by various internal and external political interests. Those diverse fortunes of English support the editors' point that the spread of English has depended on more man its self-interested promotion by the Anglophone powers. As Fishman observes, English may "be the linguafrancaof capitalist exploitation without being the vehicle of imperialism" (p. 8). Countering Phillipson's charges of Hnguadde (for a recent treatment of discourses of language endangerment see Michael Silverstein, "Contemporary Transformations of Local Linguistic Communities," Annual Review of Anthropology 27:401^426,1998), Fishman argues that the spread of English does not necessarily entail the displacement of local languages and cultures (pp. 8; 637). Yet, the volume's polemic with Phillipson seems more centrally to hinge on a clash of paradigms than on the persuasiveness of the empirical data. That war of paradigms is most palpable in the editorial contributions. In particular, Conrad's review essay in the first section of the volume demonstrates how hard it can be to give a fair shake to a rival theoretical perspective—a challenge that the author acknowledges but does not quite successfully overcome. Conrad is quite right in pointing out that the approach to the spread of English in terms of power and dominance and the functionalist approach, espoused by the volume's editors, contrasts most centrally in their underpinning visions of social change (even if we owe the metatheoretical distinction between the conflict and consensus approaches to Dahrendorf rather than Cooper, credited by Conrad). However, Conrad's belief that only the conflict approach is burdened by a rhetorical bias reflects a lack of scrutiny of his own terminological habitus on par with that administered to Phillipson's. To illustrate, the difference between attributing to language a capacity to "overtake" (p. 18) other languages (conflict school) and a capacity to spread (the central metaphor of this volume) is not, as Conrad suggests, in the presence of a metaphorical load in the first notion and its presumed absence in the second—if nothing else, each reifies the linguistic phenomena—but in the kinds of metaphorical domains those terms may activate for the reader. Moreover, neither the conflict nor functional approaches are immune from research bias. While, as Conrad observes, the concern with power and dominance indeed may divert one from recognizing such things as "linguistic social symmetry" (p. 19) and the benefits of English as international lingua franca (p. 22), the concerns with linguistic Book Reviews 257 social symmetry as supposedly evidenced in the measurable aspects of language spread can mask linguistic marginalization. Conrad's argument (p. 25) interpreting low percentages of English speakers in Kenya, Nigeria, or Pakistan as a fatal blow to Phillipson's thesis mat English replaces and marginalizes local languages in those settings well exemplifies such a case of two paradigmatic ships passing in the night. Conceptualizing language replacement and marginalization solely in terms of speaker's ratios, Conrad ignores other aspects of those phenomena such as changes in the communicative value, functions, and social prestige of the varieties cohabiting a social space (for a discussion of the relevant approaches see Don Kulick, Language Shift and Cultural Reproduction: Socialization, Self, and Syncretism in a Papua New Guinean Village, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). A critique exclusively targeting the speaker ratios seems especially inappropriate for Phillipson's approach, which defines linguistic marginalization and imperialism in those more inclusive terms (1992:47). Even a quantitatively oriented reader will find room for improvement in the statistical analysis comparing the former Anglo-American colonies with noncolonies, authored by Alma Rubal-Lopez. While Rubal-Lopez seeks to establish "what forces may be impacting on the spread of English" (p. 37), her interpretation of the synchronic correlation of the variables as evidence of causality is perplexing. The study also raises some questions regarding the construction of the variables. It is not clear, for example, whether the author treats the numbers of students from "non-English mother-tongue countries" studying in "English mother-tongue countries" (p. 40) as a direct measure of the numbers of persons learning English or as an index of the spread of English in the countries of their origin—in which case one would need to know the percentages of returning students. While the volume makes an interesting and informative contribution to the study of the globalization of English, its polemics with the conflict-oriented approach call for a more extensive exploration of the relevant theoretical horizons. The absence of Bourdieu in a discussion of language and power, of Gramsci or Raymond Williams in a discussion of hegemony, of Benedict Anderson in a discussion of language and nationalism is surprising, and leads to such statements as, "hegemonic, of course, being no more than a currently fashionable term for sociology's traditional term 'stratificationaT " (p. 639), evidencing the volume's conceptual estrangement from the approaches it endeavors critically to entertain.