Journal of Sociolinguistics 15/3, 2011: 398–428 BOOK REVIEWS SINFREE MAKONI AND ALASTAIR PENNYCOOK (eds.). Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages. Clevedon, U.K: Multilingual Matters. 2007. 249 pp. Pb (1853599231) £21.95. Reviewed by CHRISTOF DEMONT-HEINRICH Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages, edited by Sinfree Makoni and Alastair Pennycook, is a deeply thought-provoking volume which challenges conventional notions about language, the study of language and language policy. It’s a must-read for anyone interested in the many complex sociological, ontological and epistemological questions that swirl around language, culture, globalization and identity. All of the volume’s ten chapters, which range in topic from language politics and ideology in Indonesia to the question of indigenous cultural education in Brazil, are engaging and well-written. Particularly rich in terms of their ability to inspire thought are those chapters authored and co-authored by the editors themselves. That noted, I frequently found myself troubled by a tendency on the part of Makoni and Pennycook as well as some of the other authors in this volume: a. to fail to sufficiently ground their arguments about the hybrid, Creole, fuzzy, shifting, dynamic nature of language within the matrix of socially produced relations of power; b. similarly, to push toward sometimes largely uncritical celebration of hybridity and hybrid language forms, for instance, urban vernaculars and to valorise individual agency. Why, for instance, do social agents make the decisions they do about language, or, to use Makoni and Pennycook’s preferred framework, why do they perform identity(ies) in the ways that they do? What are the larger, complex, but also very specific and inevitably hierarchical social relations that, for instance, motivate individuals to use a particular dialect, hybrid, Creole, or standardized language form in context A, B, or C – and not to use it in context X, Y or Z? These are some of the crucial questions this volume does not address. Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages begins with a thoughtful Foreword, ‘Intervening discourses, representations and conceptualizations of language’, by Ofelia Garçia. As Garçia notes, on a broad level, the volume’s focus is twofold. First, it aims to deconstruct, or disinvent, contemporary notions of language. Second, it seeks to push the study of language as well as the teaching of languages  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK, and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA BOOK REVIEWS 399 away from a focus on language itself and toward how real people use language and what they do with it. Makoni and Pennycook lay out their basic arguments and outline the overall aim of the volume in Chapter 1, ‘Disinventing and reconstituting languages’. These revolve around the charge that languages are historical inventions and that those interested in the study of language and the teaching of language(s) need to recognize this fact and act based on this recognition. Makoni and Pennycook focus in particular on Africa and the ways in which colonial constructions of Africa have shaped (mis)understandings of language in that context. The authors reserve special criticism for scholars and advocates of linguistic diversity (Skutnabb-Kangas, Romaine and Nettle, etc.), charging the latter with dealing in ‘reductive’ strategies or ‘enumeration’. Makoni’s and Pennycook’s claims that language boundaries are constructs, that language is constantly changing, and that those categories used to organize understandings of, and policies in relation to, language(s) are on the mark. However, it’s unclear what specific, concrete, workable policies Makoni and Pennycook would propose to replace those they view as reductive. Chapter 2, ‘Then there were languages: Bahasa Indonesia was one among many’, by Ariel Heryanto, examines the historical invention of ‘Bahasa’ in postcolonial Indonesia. Heryanto introduces some of the major features of vernacular Javanese and Malay, looks at some of the contemporary characteristics of Bahasa, offers some preliminary interpretation of how developmentalism as one form of universalism and practice came to the fore in the historical process, and notes some of the resistance the process has provoked. Heryanto also draws attention to the important role formal, written forms of language play in the development and definition of languages. In Chapter 3, ‘Critical historiography: Does language planning in Africa need a construct of language as part of its theoretical apparatus’, Sinfree Makoni and Pedzisai Mashiri advocate for the adoption of what they call a ‘human linguistics’. Among other things, such an approach involves foregrounding how individuals use language as well as conceiving of, and approaching, language in the African context in a holistic fashion that acknowledges the widespread reality of the multiplicity, dynamism, fuzziness and overlapping nature of communication practices and modes. According to Mashiri and Makoni, the key to cultural and communicative justice lies not in protecting small minority languages from disappearance, but in creating spaces and places for the new hybrids that are emerging to thrive – in particular in urban areas where a mixing of languages is perhaps the most pronounced. As does Mashiri’s and Makoni’s chapter, Pennycook’s Chapter 4, ‘The myth of English as an international language’, forces critical introspection. Drawing on Foucault and Judith Butler, Pennycook seeks to construct language as a performative act of identity. But is this performative act essentially free-flowing, creative, and inherently agentive in the sense that individuals can basically do what they want with language? Or is it largely a bounded performance, one in  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 400 BOOK REVIEWS which users must adhere to essentially rigid linguistic practices and roles based on the context, with the power contexts such as international academia and publishing – which, for instance, requires Pennycook to write in an AngloAmerican standard form of English – one of the most rigid of all of these performative contexts? Finally, how does what is (not (allowed to be)) performed in this social context and that one affect the range of (im)possibility elsewhere? Unfortunately, Pennycook does not address these crucial questions, though we are treated to thought-provoking but also primarily abstract theorizing. Chapter 5, ‘Beyond “language”: Linguistic imperialism, sign languages and linguistic anthropology’, by Jan Branson and Don Miller, delivers compelling and important critique of traditional historical and contemporary linguistic (mis)approaches to sign language. In addition to biting – and, in this reviewer’s estimation, mostly spot on – critique of conventional approaches to thinking about sign language, Branson and Miller provide a useful overview of key historic developments in terms of linguistics and sign language. The authors conclude the chapter with a series of recommendations for linguists and linguistics on how to approach the study of sign language, with perhaps the most important of these being the admonition not to assume that that which appears to hold true for spoken and written language necessarily holds true for sign language. Chapter 6, ‘Entering a culture quietly: Writing and cultural survival in indigenous education in Brazil’, by Lynn Mario T. Menezes de Souza, examines some of the larger questions of the volume through the lens of academic perspectives on, and policy approaches toward, indigenous languages and indigenous groups in Brazil. De Souza draws in particular on the work of Homi Bhabha. She focuses on the ways in which the practice of writing – and its imposition on indigenous languages and language groups – can potentially affect, often in negative fashion, attempts to maintain small, less powerful indigenous languages. Chapter 7, ‘A linguistics of communicative activity’, by Steven L. Thorne and James P. Lantolf, aims to describe historical antecedents that strongly shaped what the authors interpret to be a debilitating and ongoing construction of language as a natural object independent of lived communicative activity. The authors also seek to provide a synoptic exegesis of models of language that provide usage-based and meaning-centred characterizations of linguistically-mediated human activity. The chapter is well written and provides a good summary and synthesis of the work of a number of key thinkers vis-à-vis language. Elaine Richardson’s case study approach in Chapter 8, ‘(Dis)inventing discourse: Examples from Black culture and hiphop rap/discourse’, focuses on hiphop discourse as a subgenre and discourse system within ‘the universe’ of Black discourse. The central question she explores is how rappers on one hand display orientation to their situated, public role as performing products and, on the other, connect their performance to discourses of authenticity and resistance. She devotes the first part of the chapter to defining AAVE as a genre system  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 BOOK REVIEWS 401 within Black diasporic discourses. The second half focuses on a case study of a rap performance by the African American Southern rap group OutKast (CDA). Chapter 9, ‘Educational materials reflecting heteroglossia: Disinventing ethnolinguistic differences in Bosnia-Herzegovina’, by Brigitta Busch and Jürgen Schick provides the best illustration of what a specific instance of disinvention and reconstitution might look like. It does so by way of a close examination of a school manual developed by an Austrian NGO that was (and perhaps still is) being used as a multicultural teaching aid. The manual, called Pogedi: Open Teaching and Intercultural Learning, rejects the neat, ethnic and language boundaries often projected onto the population in Bosnia-Herzegovina in favour of a teaching approach that highlights hybrid language and cultural forms while also situating these forms socially, historically and culturally. Suresh Canagarajah concludes the volume with Chapter 10, ‘After disinvention: Possibilities for communication, community and competence’. He delivers an inspiring call for more democracy and egalitarianism vis-àvis English. Of course, he does so in an academic book chapter written in a comparatively rigid, standardized English. When international academic journals begin accepting articles written in something other than American or British Standard written English and when advocates of greater democracy and fluidity of language start pushing for this, and creating more egalitarian language contexts (for instance, at academic conferences), then perhaps it won’t feel quite so much like the postmodern etherealism it does here and more like real, concrete, meaningful social change. Why limit disinvention to others and other contexts outside the academic realm? Why not also disinvent and reconstitute language in the least pliable, most hegemonic communicative contexts, including international (English) publishing? These contexts are arguably disproportionately dominating in terms of their influence on the hegemonic rules of language practice in many other contexts. After all, it is these power contexts that are inevitably referred to in arguments about ‘correctness’ and in which, for example, the educational documents and items used to teach language are produced. CHRISTOF DEMONT-HENRICH School of Communication University of Denver 2490 S. Gaylord St. Denver, CO 80208 U.S.A. cdemonth@du.edu  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 402 BOOK REVIEWS ESPERANÇA BIELSA AND SUSAN BASSNETT. Translation in Global News. London: Routledge. 2009. 162 pp. Pb (9780415409728) £24.99. Reviewed by CHRISTOF DEMONT-HEINRICH Language and translation are central to global media. Yet, to a large extent, media, cultural and globalization studies have essentially ignored questions of language and translation. Translation studies have also largely failed to examine the crucial intersection between media, globalization, language and translation. This significant and troubling gap in scholarship on globalization and media is what makes Translation in Global News by Esperança Bielsa and Susan Bassnett so refreshing – and important. Bielsa and Bassnett step expertly into this gap and begin to close it quite nicely with a book of considerable theoretical depth and breadth. Translation in Global News is easily accessible and relevant for scholars from all disciplines interested in global information flows, global hierarchies and inequalities, and questions of language and power as these relate to the complex, ever-changing and frequently cross-cutting social phenomenon typically referred to as ‘globalization’. This is due in part to the inherently interdisciplinary nature of examining the role of language and translation in news and in part to the authors’ writing, which does not slip into the use of exclusive disciplinary jargon. The book opens with an ‘Introduction’ chapter in which the authors lay out the rationale for the book, namely the dearth of research into translation and news as well as the general lack of inter-disciplinary research and awareness in this area. Chapter 1, ‘Power, language and translation’, lays out some of the basic debates about translation and how to define it. The chapter also draws attention to the central and often overlooked role of the translator in news, who the authors persuasively contend, does far more than engage in direct and literal linguistic translation (something which Bielsa and Bassnett, in any case, rightly reject as impossible). Especially interesting is the authors’ discussion of two different approaches to translation – domestication and foreignization. Domestication entails customizing a translation so that it is considered a good fit for the local culture and language into which it is being translated. This approach renders invisible the translator, the translation process and, potentially, cultural difference as well. Foreignization is a counter-hegmonic approach to translation. It seeks to remain true to the original cultural frame of the translated work and, because it does, ideally ends up drawing readers’ attention to significant differences in cultural paradigms. Bielsa and Bassnett devote Chapter 2, ‘Globalization and translation’, to an overview of various theories and definitions of globalization from some of the wellknown theorists including: Manuel Castells, Anthony Giddens, David Harvey,  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 BOOK REVIEWS 403 Scott Lash and John Urry, and Saskia Sassen. Bielsa and Bassnett latch in particular onto Sassen’s work on ‘global cities’, which they favor because of its focus on the concrete instances in which the local and global intermix. In fact, Bielsa and Bassnett’s case study of two international news agency offices in Latin America later in the book clearly reflects their affinity for a Sassen-like conceptualization of globalization. As the title indicates, Chapter 3, ‘Globalization and news: The role of the news agencies in historical perspective’, offers a detailed historical overview of the rise of global news agencies with a special concentration on Reuters, a British-based agency, and Agence France-Presse (AFP). Drawing in particular from the work of Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Bielsa and Bassnett chart the material, political-economic and technological contours of the rise of large news agencies such as Reuters and AFP and their eventual transformation into truly global media agencies with their own network of journalists situated around the globe. In Chapter 4, ‘Translation in global news agencies’, Bielsa and Bassnett examine and outline some of the basic practices and norms of journalists, in particular those of the editors who work for international news agencies in foreign bureaus. The authors also establish a typology of major features in news translation as well as a list of different types of textual intervention performed by journalists who translate news. Chapter 5, ‘Journalism and translation: Practice, strategies and values in the news agencies’, forms the empirical core of the book. Here, Bielsa and Bassnett discuss the case studies upon which much of their book is based. The AFP Latin American bureau located in Montevideo, Uruguay and the Inter Press Service (IPS) Latin American bureau in the same city, serve as the comparative case studies. While AFP represents a global mainstream news agency, IPS stands as an example of an alternative media organization. Despite the fact that they spend a good portion of their time translating, journalists, especially those at AFP, typically do not conceive of themselves as translators. Also in Chapter 5, the authors discuss an example of the difficulty the Montevideo AFP editors had in translating stories originally written for an American/European audience about the death of Ronald Reagan, which occurred during the time the case study was conducted. The copy that came across the wire in English to the bureau editors portrayed Reagan in warm, fuzzy terms. However, this was not necessarily the way many in Latin America thought of the former U.S. president. Thus, the translation process involved taking out some of the fluffier information – for example, information about the last look Reagan gave his wife Nancy before he died – and adding historical background about U.S./Latin American relations during the Reagan era entirely missing from the original content. This example clearly illustrates the authors’ maxim that news translation involves both linguistic and cultural translation and adaptation.  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 404 BOOK REVIEWS Bielsa and Bassnett move from news production research in Chapter 5 to textual analysis in Chapter 6, ‘Reading translated news: An analysis of agency texts’. Here, they compare different language versions of the same news story and reflect on some of the differences and similarities. The book’s final chapter, ‘Translation and trust’, focuses on the question of veracity in relation to both translation and to cultural reinterpretation/framing, drawing in particular from Habermas’ ideas of truth, appropriateness and sincerity. Translation in Global News is a very good book. However, it would be strengthened by the addition of a couple of components. First, given the authors’ general reflexivity and their insistence on the significance of drawing attention to the translation process, it would have been nice to see Bielsa and Bassnett discuss and reflect on their own language backgrounds as well as the processes of translation they went through in producing the book. Second, given the authors’ call for additional research into translation and news near the beginning of the book, it would have made sense for them offer some specific suggestions on areas, questions, issues, problems for future research at the conclusion. Certainly, there is much research potential in global media and translation. For instance, Bielsa and Bassnett never really get to the fascinating issue of the increasing prevalence of English as global auxiliary language in global media. What is the history of – or the potential cultural, political and economic ramifications of – a trend which can see, for example, a German-speaking journalist interview a Russian source in English and translate the information and quotes he or she gleans from the source back into German? Or, alternatively, what are some of the political economic as well as cultural considerations that come into play in terms of large news organizations and their decisions to publish content in particular languages on their web sites? Which languages do they use, why, how much of their content gets translated into which of these languages, or which languages see more content translated from a source and/or auxiliary language? In the end, Translation in Global News is both an informative and enjoyable read. It advocates for, and practices, interdisciplinarity, and it focuses on an extremely under-studied and far too often overlooked aspect of global news production, distribution and consumption: language and translation. It’s shameful that globalization, media and international communication scholars, on the whole, tend to gloss over, pretty much completely, the crucial issues of language and translation. Much of this lack of interest in language and translation may be rooted in disciplinary parochialism. Language, in the minds of many media and communication scholars, is the province of linguistics. In fact, as Bielsa and Bassnett so persuasively illustrate, the study of media and globalization is fundamentally interdisciplinary. Hopefully, some of the globalization and media and international communication scholars who should read this book will indeed encounter it and read it. They will not be disappointed if they do, and it may well inspire at least some to reconsider their previous perspective on language and translation, a perspective that views language  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 BOOK REVIEWS 405 and translation in terms which render them essentially, and problematically, invisible. CHRISTOF DEMONT-HENRICH School of Communication University of Denver 2490 S. Gaylord St. Denver, CO 80208 U.S.A. cdemonth@du.edu GEOFFREY HUGHES. Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture (The Language Library). Malden, Massachusetts: Wiley-Blackwell. 2010. 320 pp. Pb (9781405152792) £17.99. Reviewed by DEBORAH CAMERON ‘Political correctness’, writes Geoffrey Hughes in his opening chapter, ‘is not one thing and does not have a single history’ (p. 3). This book is not one thing either: ranging widely in time and space (from mediaeval England to post-apartheid South Africa) with a multi-stranded approach that takes in history, language, literature and culture, it is certainly more ambitious than most studies of PC. Ambition, however, has its drawbacks. The way Hughes constantly shifts the focus of attention from historical events to words to literary texts gives Political Correctness an episodic quality that detracts from its overall coherence. Ironically, too, given the remark I quoted above, he does seem to want to present a unified history of PC thought and language, and in trying to construct a single narrative from such heterogeneous material he does not always make clear distinctions between different societies, eras and political commitments. The main body of the text (excluding the preface and conclusion) is divided into four parts of two chapters each. The first part deals with PC as a cultural phenomenon, first attempting to define the concept and then tracing the history of the ‘PC debate’ that began in the early 1990s. The second and third parts focus on language, or more exactly terminology. The second part, titled ‘The semantic aspect’, contains one chapter about the codification of word meaning in dictionaries and usage guides, and a second, much shorter one in which a politically correct ‘word field’ is identified. In the third part, ‘Zones of controversy’, Hughes goes on to examine the development of specific terms, beginning in Chapter 5 with expressions relating to race, ethnicity and nationality, then moving on in Chapter 6 to gender, sexuality, disability, religion, the environment and animal rights. The fourth part takes up a theme that has run throughout the book – the idea that the political correctness of the late-20th/21st century has parallels in  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 406 BOOK REVIEWS earlier periods of history. Drawing on canonical works of English literature from Chaucer to Dickens, Hughes shows that the attitudes targeted by modern PC go back many centuries, and points out that some writers in all ages contested or satirized the orthodox beliefs and verbal shibboleths of their time. His focus on literature does not however give him much scope to examine more direct historical antecedents to modern PC, such as John Stuart Mill’s objections to the generic masculine in the mid-19th century, and a series of campaigns relating to racial nomenclature in the U.S. before the Civil Rights era (Kennedy 2002). In relation to Hughes’s account of recent/current PC verbal hygiene, the first and most intractable difficulty I had concerned the perennial problem of definition. Hughes offers a number of general definitions for the concept of political correctness, but there is no parallel definition of politically correct language. Instead he offers, in Chapter 4, an indicative list of some 200 lexical items which are said to constitute the PC ‘word field’, explaining that these terms belong to the lexicon of PC by virtue of being ‘used in the [PC] debate . . . associated with it . . . [or] showing characteristics of PC language’ (p. 106). The first two of these criteria are relatively straightforward (leaving aside arguments about whether some of the terms were ever actually used without irony by anyone), but the last is more problematic. Theoretically unsatisfactory (because the characteristics it appeals to have not been clearly specified, giving it a circular or tautological quality), in practice it leads to the inclusion of many terms whose ‘PC’ status is far from obvious. It is obscure to me, for instance, what ‘characteristics of PC language’ are shared by ASBO, bioethics, carbon tax, global warming and passive smoking. Hughes might reply that the terms on his list show one or both of the characteristics most often identified by commentators as key features of PC language, namely abstraction and euphemism. But even if one accepted that all PC terms are abstractions/euphemisms, it would not logically follow that all abstractions/euphemisms are PC. If PC is understood as an umbrellaterm for a collection of basically left-wing ‘-isms’ – socialism, feminism, antiracism/imperialism and (increasingly) environmentalism – then many of the euphemisms on Hughes’s list could not be further from PC. Ethnic cleansing, for instance, was the creation of ultra-nationalists in former Yugoslavia; collateral damage and rendition originated as military jargon; genetically modified, according to Guy Cook (2004), was promoted by corporate interests looking for a bland alternative to genetically engineered; freedom fries was coined by U.S. conservatives as a patriotic substitute for French fries after the French proved less than enthusiastic in their support for the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’. Perhaps Hughes wants to show that he himself has no political bias by taking examples from across the global political spectrum. But a category of PC which can accommodate positions as disparate as those of Susan Sontag and Slobodan Milošević is not so much even-handed as incoherent. If the P in PC does not stand for any particular kind of politics, does the concept not become so elastic as to be meaningless?  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 BOOK REVIEWS 407 Hughes never spells out where in the above-mentioned spectrum he would place himself, but his views can be inferred from his paraphrases of and comments on other people’s. He is in favour of civility (thus, in his view, it is no bad thing if we are less tolerant than we once were of racist epithets and other expressions of gross prejudice), but opposed to censorship, euphemistic obfuscation, and coinages which he regards as ‘curious’ or ‘absurd’ (e.g. ableism, significant other). He persistently takes it that the reader will share his own understanding of what is offensive and why. He or she will simply agree, for instance, that the acronym DWEM (‘dead white European male’) is no less objectionable than any term habitually used to disparage a non-white group. If you don’t happen to share Hughes’s assumptions, you may well find his treatment of the relevant lexical items long on assertion and short on actual analysis. (I should, in fairness, point out that Hughes has similar reservations about my own treatment of PC language in Verbal Hygiene, Cameron 1995.) Political differences aside, though, Hughes makes some assertions about current English usage which I think are just factually wrong. Here, I will pick out one example where it seems to me that a closer examination of the linguistic facts could have led to a more nuanced analysis: it comes from a table contrasting ‘acceptable’ with ‘unacceptable’ expressions in the domain of sickness and injury (p. 286). ‘Living with AIDS’ is in the ‘acceptable’ column, whereas ‘living with cancer’ is categorized as unacceptable. ‘Clearly’, Hughes comments, ‘there is no longer a free choice in the use of natural language in relation to disease because of certain agendas which have developed around AIDS’. The first thing that is wrong with this analysis is that ‘living with cancer’ is by no means unacceptable. A Google search for the phrase produces 352,000 results, with the vast majority of examples occurring in texts produced by and/or for cancer patients. Quite possibly (though the speculation would need to be confirmed by historical investigation) ‘living with cancer’ was coined by analogy with the already-established ‘living with HIV/AIDS’. But their apparent equivalence in contemporary discourse points to the second thing that is wrong with Hughes’s analysis: he does not entertain the possibility that these ‘living with . . .’ formulations might be neither politically-motivated denials of the catastrophic effects of the AIDS epidemic nor euphemisms sanitizing the reality of incurable disease, but acknowledgements of a new reality brought about by recent medical advances. HIV and some cancers are among the illnesses which, though they still cannot be cured, can now be successfully managed: rather than facing imminent death, many patients diagnosed with these conditions will stay alive, and perhaps well, for long periods. People in this position are more accurately described as ‘living with X’ than ‘dying of X’. If the first is no more than a euphemism for the second, then maybe we should classify all references to people ‘living’ as euphemisms, since they obscure the unpleasant but indisputable truth that everyone currently alive is in the process of dying. That said, it is pretty clear when you look at the Google examples that ‘living with cancer’ has become a shibboleth in certain kinds of discourse, used pointedly  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 408 BOOK REVIEWS and repeatedly where other expressions would have been more natural. In short, I agree with Hughes that this usage carries ideological baggage. But whereas he supposes that this baggage must be PC, the fact that it is as noticeable in discourse on cancer as in the much more politicized discourse of HIV-AIDS reinforces my own suspicion that it is not political in the manner of PC, but has more to do with the cultural pervasiveness of therapeutic ideologies which promote self-help and ‘positive thinking’. In her recent critique of positive thinking (which was partly inspired by her own experience of cancer treatment), Barbara Ehrenreich (2009) traces its origins to the 19th century ‘New Thought’ movement, which arose as a reaction against the dominant puritan strain in U.S. culture (it produced, among other things, Christian Science). This does suggest an abstract link to PC, which has often been described as a modern secular Puritanism. But if PC and positive thinking at some level spring from a common root – which may explain why some of their surface manifestations, including their verbal hygiene practices, look similar – they are nevertheless different branches of the tree. A good scholarly history would get beneath the surface to probe their similarities and differences, rather than treating them as self-evidently ‘the same’. Finally, though, we should not underestimate the difficulty of writing a good scholarly history of PC. All attempts to date have been open to the charge of having some sort of political axe to grind, but whereas that problem will presumably disappear given time, there will always be a non-trivial problem with the sources available to historians. Much of the evidence concerning, for instance, when PC terms were first introduced and how they were used, is simply not accessible: this applies not only to the unrecorded speech of countercultural communities of practice, but also to many written sources – political ephemera like letters, diaries, flysheets and pamphlets. Even where these texts have survived, they have tended not to be sampled by dictionary-makers and the compilers of major research corpora, precisely because they are not considered representative. Hughes takes many of his examples from reference sources to which this point is relevant, such as the OED and the BNC; others come from news archives. The result is that his claims about, for instance, feminist usage, based largely on media reporting of feminism and books written about it for a general audience, are not always convincing to a former grassroots activist like me. In some cases my scepticism is justified by documentary evidence from my own personal archive, but in most it is my counter-cultural memory against Hughes’s mainstream sources, and both have obvious inadequacies and biases. Hughes cannot reasonably be criticized for not transcending the limitations of the evidence-base he had to work with. But I do not think it is unreasonable to want a subtler analysis of the available source-material than this book provides; and I hope that in time, when the political dust has settled, someone will rise to the challenge.  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 BOOK REVIEWS 409 REFERENCES Cameron, Deborah. 1995. Verbal Hygiene. London: Routledge. Cook, Guy. 2004. Genetically Modified Language. London: Routledge. Ehrenreich, Barbara. 2009. Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America. New York: Henry Holt. Kennedy, Randall. 2002. Nigger: The Strange History of a Troublesome Word. New York: Vintage. DEBORAH CAMERON Worcester College University of Oxford Oxford OX1 2HB deborah.cameron@worc.ox.ac.uk ANDREAS SEDLATSCHEK. Contemporary Indian English: Variation and Change (Varieties of English around the World General Series, Volume 38). Amsterdam, The Netherlands/Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: John Benjamins. 2009. 363 pp. Hb (9789027248985) €105.00/$158.00. Reviewed by CLAUDIA LANGE When the International Corpus of English, Indian Component (ICE-India) was released in 2002, this was probably heralded in the World Englishes community as another welcome addition to the growing family of ICE-corpora. The author of Contemporary Indian English: Variation and Change might have felt differently at the time. Andreas Sedlatschek had been compiling his own corpus of Indian English (IndE) for his study, and the release of ICE-India must have caused a serious crisis of doubt in the purpose of his project. However, Sedlatschek decided to carry on regardless, and he has made the most of his predicament. Sedlatschek’s project is to provide a descriptive account of contemporary IndE that goes beyond what he labels the ‘feature list approach’ to IndE in being firmly empirical. In order to test the validity of many statements about ‘typical Indianisms’, he compiled his ‘Primary Corpus’ consisting of overall 180,000 words, with roughly 80,000 words of press texts from national Indian newspapers and another 80,000 words of broadcast transcriptions representing the ‘standard usage range’ (p. 42) of written and spoken IndE. The selection of press texts was also made to allow comparison with the earlier Kolhapur corpus of IndE as well as the LOB and FLOB corpora of British English (BrE) and the BROWN and FROWN corpora of American English (AmE) – the relevant ‘prestige varieties’, as Sedlatschek calls them. Such a corpus design further allows him to include a diachronic perspective (LOB and BROWN contain texts from the sixties, FLOB and FROWN from the nineties of the last century) as well as to  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 410 BOOK REVIEWS consider possible shifts in exonormative orientation, away from BrE to AmE. The remaining 20,000 words were supplied by student essays ‘to strike a balance between the heavily edited press genres and the broadcast material’ (p. 43). This corpus forms the empirical backbone of the study. Additionally, Sedlatschek occasionally draws on data from ICE-India when it comes to the frequency of a particular feature in spoken vs. written IndE. He has further used ‘“snapshots” from the Internet’ (p. 44) to supplement his Primary Corpus when it proved too limited in size. These internet ‘snapshots’ are also highly useful to assess the status of a particular form as ‘Indianism’, ‘South Asianism’ or as belonging to the common core of contemporary international English. One minor point mentioned several times (e.g. on pp. 1, 18, 62 and 64) in the introductory chapters in connection with L1 interference as a possible explanatory parameter should not go uncorrected: Hindi is not India’s national language; the Indian constitution proclaims Hindi merely to be the official language of the Union – a more than nominal difference particularly for Indians living below the Hindi belt. The individual IndE features to be investigated are distilled from an exhaustive survey of available descriptions of IndE, including Indian usage guides for English, handbooks of varieties of English as well as more in-depth studies of particular phenomena. The corpus evidence concerning these features is then discussed in the three main chapters of the book, ‘Vocabulary’ (96 pages), ‘Lexicosyntax’ (47 pages), and ‘Morphosyntax and grammar at the sentence level’ (112 pages). The chapter on vocabulary deals with loanwords derived from Indian languages, neologisms such as speedmoney (‘bribe’) and timepass (‘pastime’), patterns of word formation said to be typical for IndE and some instances of semantic change concerning individual lexical items. A subchapter deals with ‘lexical style variation’, that is the preference for specific expressions (e.g. amid vs. amidst, lectureship vs. lecturership) and the use of contracted forms. Finally, the impact of BrE vs. AmE with respect to spelling and vocabulary (e.g. rubbish vs. garbage) is considered. The chapter offers a wealth of individual observations about the IndE lexicon. Many of Sedlatschek’s findings prove earlier accounts to be downright wrong or at least sloppy in that they claim a much wider usage range for a specific expression than attested in actual language use across registers. However, some of his concerns in this chapter may fail to fully impress the reader, such as the observation that lathicharge (‘police attack with a bamboo baton’) occurs without a hyphen in the South Indian newspaper The Hindu, but with a hyphen in the North Indian The Tribune. Whether such differences really are ‘a source of variation and differentiation in written IndE’ (p. 146) or just indicative of a specific house style remains to be seen. The chapter on lexicosyntax is the shortest of the three main empirical chapters and covers two main topics, namely variation in the realm of particle verbs and verb complementation patterns. These topics have been tackled by quite a few quantitative studies over the last years, and Sedlatschek’s data lead him to similar conclusions, namely that the differences between IndE and other varieties of  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 BOOK REVIEWS 411 English in this realm ‘are rarely of a qualitative, more often of a quantitative and register-specific kind’ (p. 195). The largest chapter on IndE (morpho-)syntax covers an impressive range of features. Some of the topics included here belong to the most widely discussed aspects of IndE syntax, for example the variation in article use or the lack of inversion in questions. Other topics such as the mandative subjunctive have so far not featured prominently in research on IndE. Some chapters go beyond a purely quantitative analysis of the distribution of a specific feature and look closer at the meanings and functions in context. Not surprisingly, forms and features which are not ‘in line with the codified norms of standard English’ (p. 273) tend to cluster ‘in less heavily edited forms of speech and writing’ (p. 274). Considering the wealth of data presented in these three chapters, it is perhaps only natural that such a motley array of different linguistic features does not lend itself to an analysis from a more coherent theoretical perspective. Sedlatschek is very considerate in avoiding rash overgeneralizations when these are not supported by his data, and generally refrains from monocausal explanations. However, sometimes the cumulative character of his explanations leads to apparent contradictions. When interpreting the IndE data on verbal concord with collective nouns such as committee or government, for example, Sedlatschek first considers the IndE preference for singular verbal concord as an indicator ‘that IndE, like New Zealand English, is more advanced than BrE in this process, possibly under the influence from contemporary AmE’ (p. 249). The data showing that BrE press texts display a higher incidence of variable concord with collective nouns than IndE press texts are then explained ‘as a repercussion of a BrE “affectation” typical of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’ (p. 249), and ‘IndE was independent enough around that time not to be affected by these developments’ (p. 256). Elsewhere, however, Sedlatschek explains specific features as ‘remnants of nineteenthcentury English’ (p. 196), calling the IndE ‘independence’ into question. Similarly, higher proportions of non-standard usages in the student essays are frequently accounted for by reference to the ‘acquisitional context’, i.e. learner errors, but when the student essays show lower frequencies of a particular feature, as is the case with e.g. interrogative inversion in embedded contexts, this is then attributed to a ‘high degree of exonormatively oriented scholastic mediation in this particular instance’ (pp. 296–297). Why ‘scholastic mediation’ should be so successful in precisely this realm of English syntax but not in others is left unspecified. The conclusion addresses the question of how ‘different’ IndE really is. To put it differently: what does the evidence accumulated in the book tell us about the status of IndE as an autonomous variety in its own right? Sedlatschek insists on acknowledging IndE’s ‘independent development [. . .] it is not a copy of any other English and should not be treated as such’ (p. 314). He also takes up a proposal made in the literature to ‘treat IndE as a semi-autonomous variety of English  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 412 BOOK REVIEWS shaped simultaneously by local as well as global forces’ (p. 315). Significantly, contact-induced language change is not included in the notion of ‘local forces’ when it comes to syntax: ‘none of the case studies designed to measure the impact of L1 interference on IndE supports the view that interference from Indian languages should be a major driving force for syntactic variation’ (p. 313). This is a point that is highly likely to be taken up by other researchers working in the field. After all, Sedlatschek concedes that ‘the impact of L1 interference affects IndE differently across different text categories and registers’ (p. 313). Studies in contact linguistics have typically turned to spontaneous conversations as those contexts which prompt multilingual speakers to draw spontaneously on all the linguistic resources that are available to them, and this register was notably absent from Sedlatschek’s corpus. To conclude: the study puts many of the ‘typical Indianisms’ that have been handed down from textbook to textbook into perspective and, thus, represents an invaluable update on the available descriptive accounts of IndE. The book will also serve as an indispensable point of reference for further corpus-based research on IndE. Anybody planning a new edition of an IndE usage guide or a handbook of World Englishes would be well advised to consult Sedlatschek first. CLAUDIA LANGE Institut für Anglistik Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen Giessen Germany claudia.lange@anglistik.uni-giessen.de PINGALI SAILAJA. Indian English (Dialects of English). Edinburgh, U.K.: Edinburgh University Press. 2009. 172 pp. Pb (9780748625956) £16.99. Reviewed by DAVID DETERDING Like other volumes in the Dialects of English series published by Edinburgh University Press, this book on Indian English (IE) has an introductory chapter setting the scene, followed by one chapter each on the variety’s phonetics and phonology, morphosyntax, and lexis and discourse. There is then a concluding chapter on the history and current changes in IE, followed by an annotated bibliography of the major works on IE and finally some sample texts of IE through history and also the transcripts of two spoken monologues by Indian women, Ira and Deepta. The recordings of these two monologues, lasting for 50 and 151 seconds respectively, are available from a dedicated website. One thing that is a little unusual about this volume is that the history of English in India is presented in the last chapter. At first glance, this seems a bit strange, as one might think it is more natural to introduce the history in the initial chapter, to provide some background for the rest of the material. But perhaps  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 BOOK REVIEWS 413 it does make sense to combine a discussion of the history with an evaluation of current changes in IE, and locating this material at the end of the book results in the concluding chapter finishing quite neatly by offering a glimpse into possible future trends. In all of the chapters, there is a careful but succinct consideration of the features of IE, and most of the material is well researched and presented. However, one disappointing aspect is how rarely the observed features of IE are placed in context, particularly by reference to the texts and recordings in the final chapter of the book. Although it is true that the two transcribed audio recordings together only last for less than three and a half minutes, which would certainly be insufficient to illustrate all the features of IE that are discussed in the book, examples of at least some of them could have been found, particularly the features of pronunciation outlined in Chapter 2. For example, we are told (p. 21) that /g/ is generally absent and a plosive is used instead, and this observation would have been enriched by reference to the pronunciation of that with an initial plosive by Ira (at a location two seconds from the start of the recording). Similarly, in the discussion of a long monophthong [o:] rather than a diphthong in words such as no, go and groan (p. 25), it would have been valuable to mention the monophthongal vowel in spoke as uttered by Deepta (22 seconds from the start). In fact, in the whole book there seems to be only one single reference to the audio recordings, in a discussion of the use of and in the chapter on discourse (p. 85). The failure to make greater use of the audio data and thereby give some context for the material is not just a missed opportunity to embellish the presentation, as it results in some of the observed features of IE being rather uncertain out of context. For example, stir is given as an IE equivalent of ‘strike’ and clever as meaning ‘intelligent, especially cunning’ (p. 68), but these examples would only really make sense if they were put in context. As it is, many of the lexical items end up as lists of words, and in some cases the special nature of the way the words are used in IE remains obscure. Furthermore, when some interesting data is introduced to illustrate code-switching between English and Telegu (pp. 90–91), it would have been helpful if we knew where it came from. Is it from the transcript of a recording? If so, how was it recorded? Quite apart from this absence of context for the examples, there are a few problems with the phonology as presented in Chapter 2. Firstly, representing an aspirated plosive as /ph/ is not ideal; surely /p/, using a proper raised symbol to indicate aspiration, would have been better. Then, on page 23, we are told that ‘sometimes words with wh- are aspirated’, with the result that why can be pronounced as ‘/vhai/ or /whai/’, and this concept of an aspirated approximant is rather unusual in phonetic description, where aspiration is more commonly associated with plosives. Finally, throughout Chapter 2, the selection of phonemic // slashes or phonetic [ ] brackets seems to be almost random. For example, we are told that /θ/ may be ‘dental plosives /t1/ or /t1h/’ (p. 21), and it would have been better if the alternative realisations (allophones) were shown in square brackets. Then we are informed that ‘[p] in pin, upon, suppose is aspirated’  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 414 BOOK REVIEWS (p. 23), but as the sound is a phoneme whose exact realisation is being discussed, it would have been better to show it as /p/ rather than [p]. In fact, not only might some of the terminology and the selection of slashes or brackets be questioned, but some of the phonological analysis is a little strange. It is stated (p. 30) that one type of ‘extra heavy syllable’ is where there is ‘a long vowel followed by at least one consonant’ and then we are told that ‘stress falls on the first syllable of a bisyllabic word unless the second syllable is extra heavy’. Then, to illustrate this, we are given the words  mistake,  monsoon and  concrete, all with the stress shown on the first syllable, even though all of them clearly seem to have an extra heavy second syllable. Maybe this is just a typographical error, and the intention was to show the second syllable as stressed. One thing that is occasionally troubling is that some features are claimed for IE when in fact they can be found in many varieties of standard English. For example: • we find that rasberry, vocal chords and auxillary are common misspellings (p. 27), but surely these occur in all varieties of English; • we are told that words such as fast and missed undergo consonant cluster simplification (p. 29), but it is well known that this occurs in RP British English if the next word begins with a consonant (Cruttenden 2008: 303); • committee member is suggested as a creation of IE (p. 78), but again there seems nothing unusual about this; and • maths is given as a clipping from mathematics (p. 83) when this is actually the norm in Britain. Despite a few questionable items such as these, most of the material is carefully presented, and this slim volume represents a valuable overview of the features, history and status of IE. Inevitably, in such a compact description, further details might have been valuable, not just to offer some context for the features that are described, but also to elaborate on various issues, especially in the final chapter on history and current changes. For instance, it is stated (p. 111) that ‘Hindi became the official language of the country’ and then later in the same paragraph we are told ‘Most people think that Hindi is the national language of India and this myth has been continuously perpetrated. In fact, it was meant to be, and remains, an official language.’ It might have helped to explain this more fully, particularly to highlight the difference between the official language and an official language, and also to elaborate a bit on the difference between an official language and a national language. Then it is stated (p. 112) that, as part of the three-language policy that was promoted, ‘If the native language was Hindi, another modern Indian language was to be learnt, preferably one from the south.’ Although this is certainly accurate, it might have been useful to discuss it further by noting that in some places the spirit of the three-language policy was defeated when students opted for Sanskrit or Urdu instead of a southern Indian language (Amritavalli and Jayaseelan 2007: 76). And a little elaboration would  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 BOOK REVIEWS 415 also have been useful when reference is made of Boxwallah English (p. 112) but we learn nothing more about it. If Boxwallah English is worth mentioning, one might have thought that a sentence or two stating what it is would have been valuable. Finally, there are a few places where additional evidence would have helped to support some of the claims. For example, there is a statement (p. 115) that ‘over the centuries, the linguistic features of IE have been more or less the same.’ Is it really true that there have been few changes in IE over the centuries? This seems to conflict with much work in World Englishes today which observes that all language varieties are subject to constant change, and furthermore that there is a tendency for Englishes to evolve. For example, Schneider (2007: 161–173) traces the development of English in India and suggests that there are indications that it is moving into the fourth phase of a five-phase cycle of its evolution into a fully mature, autonomous variety of English. Then, later in the final chapter, it is stated that Hindi has managed to gain a position as a useful language throughout the country ‘not because of educational efforts but almost completely due to Bollywood’ (p. 118), but no evidence is provided to support this sweeping conclusion. How can we be sure that Bollywood really has had such a powerful influence and that the educational system has had almost none? Despite a few issues such as these, the book contains plenty of valuable information that is carefully collated – even if some of the phonological analysis might be questioned, it would have enriched the material throughout the book to present more of the features in context, and the explanation is rather succinct in a few places. Overall the material is well presented and the book will undoubtedly prove a valuable addition to the Dialects of English series. REFERENCES Amritavalli, R. and K. A. Jayaseelan. 2007. India. In Andrew Simpson (ed.) Language & National Identity in Asia. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. 55–83. Cruttenden, Alan. 2008. Gimson’s Pronunciation of English (7th edition). London: Hodder Education. Schneider, Edgar W. 2007. Postcolonial Englishes: Varieties around the World. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press. DAVID DETERDING Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) University of Brunei Darussalam (UBD) Jalan Tungku Link Gadong, BE1410 BRUNEI dhdeter@gmail.com  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 416 BOOK REVIEWS MA. LOURDES S. BAUTISTA AND KINGSLEY BOLTON (eds.). Philippine English: Linguistic and Literary Perspectives (Asian Englishes Today). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. 2008. 405 pp. Hb (9789622099470) $60.28. Reviewed by DAVID DETERDING This book consists of an introduction by the editors followed by eighteen chapters that provide an overview of the current status and use of English language and literature in the Philippines, and finally an extensive list of bibliographical resources. It is divided into three parts: • the first offers a sociolinguistic context, in particular discussing attitudes towards English in the Philippines; • part two has the title ‘Linguistic Forms’, and it gives a linguistic analysis of some of the features of Philippine English; and • the final part deals with Philippine English literature. The first part consists of six chapters. In Chapter 1, the late Andrew Gonzales gives a sociolinguistic and historical overview of the use of English in the Philippines. In Chapter 2, Allan Bernardo discusses English in the education system, describing the implementation of the bilingual program and also current controversies over the use of English. Chapter 3, by Danilo Dayag, considers English-language media in the Philippines and shows how lots of published material involves code-switching. In Chapter 4, Ruanni Tupas discusses issues with postcolonial discourse, while Chapter 5 by D. Manarpaac challenges the adoption of Filipino as the national language of the Philippines, particularly because it favours the native speakers of Tagalog around Manila in the north, and instead suggests that English offers a far more egalitarian option for the whole country. In the final chapter of the first part, Vincente Rafael discusses the role of Taglish – Tagalog sprinkled with various words from English – in literature, films, and comics, especially how it can provide a voice for the non-elite members of society, often as a means of protest against those in power. The second part of the book consists of five chapters. In the first, Curtis McFarland provides an overview of the indigenous languages of the Philippines and then considers how Tagalog has been influenced by borrowing from English. In Chapter 8, Ma. Lourdes Tayao analyses the vowels, consonants and suprasegmentals of acrolectal, mesolectal and basilectal Philippine English. In Chapter 9, Kingsley Bolton and Susan Butler discuss how lexical borrowings from Tagalog and other indigenous languages are represented in English dictionaries in the Philippines, and they are particularly critical of the widely-used Webster’s dictionary which lists many archaic borrowings but fails to include many recent words with widespread usage. Chapter 10, by Ma. Lourdes Bautista, compares the frequency of occurrence of some grammatical patterns in the components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) from the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore and Great Britain. In Chapter 11, Jane Lockwood, Gail Forey and  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 BOOK REVIEWS 417 Helen Price consider the language used by workers in call centers in the Philippines and how breakdowns in communication can occur when they are talking to customers in the United States. The third part of the book, dealing with literature, consists of seven chapters. The first, by Isabel Martin, considers the English literary texts that were memorized by generations of Philippine students, and the influence that this has had on their English. In Chapter 13, Lily Rose Tope illustrates how modern writers in the Philippines use English to explore their local rhythms and cadences, and she observes that such explorations in the use of English are no longer always seen as deviant. The next three chapters consider different literary genres. Chapter 14, by Gémino Abad, describes how Philippine poetry evolved through three stages, from an initial romantic style through a formalist stage and finally to a mature, post-modern style free from the constraints of formalism; Chapter 15, by Cristina Hidalgo, deals with the English short story, a medium in which Filipino writers have excelled; and in Chapter 16, Caroline Hau considers the Filipino novel in English. In Chapter 17, the literature of the Filipino diaspora is discussed by Alfred Yuson. Finally, Chapter 18 provides a transcript of three people, Simeon Dumdum, Timothy Mo and Resil Mojares, talking about the tradition of creative writing in English in the Cebuano region. Throughout the book, there is plenty of interesting material most of which is clearly presented. For example: • the detailed analysis of the language of the media in Chapter 3 presents some substantial data and is carefully tabulated to show that, while the more serious media tends to be in English, popular publications such as gossip magazines tend to be in Tagalog or other indigenous languages; • in Chapter 7, there is a substantial comparison of the lexicon, phonology and syntax of various Philippino languages, including Tagalog, Bikol, Hiligaynon and Cebuano, and while it is not immediately clear how this is relevant for English in the Philippines, it does provide some kind of background for the subsequent discussion of borrowing from English in Tagalog; • Chapter 9 offers a detailed and authoritative discussion about the failure of modern dictionaries to reflect current usage in Philippine English accurately; • in Chapter 10, careful analysis of some of the different components of the ICE corpus shows that the widespread use of wherein in the Philippines contrasts with the almost complete absence of the word in Singapore, Hong Kong and the UK (p. 210); and • in Chapter 11, there is an interesting analysis of the breakdown in communication in call-center interactions, including some valuable transcripts of problematic conversations between Philippine call-center workers and their American customers. In some cases, however, the presentation of the data leaves one wishing that more details had been given or that there had been greater elaboration of some of  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 418 BOOK REVIEWS the issues. For example, on page 19 we learn that there is a tendency to pronounce /υ/ as /u/, and this can be classified as ‘a spelling pronunciation’, which is a little mysterious – an example or two would have helped; and on the same page we are told that there is a ‘variable lack of distinction between the rounded and unrounded mid-back vowels /o/ and /ɔ/’, which is equally confusing as both of these vowels are usually regarded as rounded. Then on page 59 we are told that the editorials in Philippine English newspapers are characterised by three obligatory moves, namely Establishing Common Ground, Making a Claim, and Issuing a Counterclaim, but it is a little hard to interpret this fully without more information about how it differs from the structure of editorials found in other varieties of English. Finally, on pages 144 and 147 we are presented with some fascinating extracts of Taglish, illustrating widespread mixing between Tagalog and English; but are these real examples or are they invented? And if they are real, why are we not given a few more details about how the data was collected? One other issue that occasionally interferes with the presentation of material is that some of the language used is surprisingly prescriptive for a work that we assume is intended to describe rather than criticize Philippine English. For example: • it is suggested that ‘errors’ committed by the current generation of English teachers ‘are fossilized’ (p. 22); • we are told about ‘faulty article usage’, ‘faulty preposition usage’ and ‘faulty noun usage’ (p. 58); • there is mention of ‘correct stress’ (p. 164), which syllable ‘stress should fall on’ (p. 165) and the absence of falling intonation ‘in questions where it was called for’ (p. 167); • it is suggested that use of such in Philippine and Hong English ‘appears to be deviant’ (p. 208); and • it is observed that Filipina domestic helper speech in Hong Kong can be ‘ungrammatical’ and ‘disjointed’ (p. 273). A further matter that might be linked with this adoption of a prescriptive tone in some of the material is the assumption of falling standards in Philippine English. For example, there is a discussion of efforts ‘for the restoration of English language competence’ (p. 23), which seems to indicate uncritical acceptance of claims that standards of English have fallen in recent years; and there is an assumption of ‘the level of English-language proficiency in the country having steadily deteriorated’ (p. 308). But what actual evidence is there that competence in English has declined? Was there ever really a golden age in the past when everyone spoke and wrote better? In fact, given the booming call-center industry which insists that its workers speak excellent English so that they can communicate efficiently with customers in the U.S.A., one might assume that standard English with clear articulation is actually becoming more widespread in the Philippines, at  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 BOOK REVIEWS 419 least in the region around Manila where most of the call-center industry is based. In conclusion, despite a few blemishes such as these, with some cases where additional information or elaboration would have helped, with inappropriate prescriptive language cropping up in a few places, and the occasional assumption of falling proficiency in English with no supporting evidence, this book contains a wealth of varied material about English in the Philippines which many readers will undoubtedly find exceptionally valuable. DAVID DETERDING Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) University of Brunei Darussalam (UBD) Jalan Tungku Link Gadong, BE1410 BRUNEI dhdeter@gmail.com MATHIAS SCHULZE, JAMES M. SKIDMORE, DAVID G. JOHN, GRIT LIEBSCHER AND SEBASTIAN SIEBEL-ACHENBACH (eds.). German Diasporic Experiences. Identity, Migration, and Loss. Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. 2008. 518 pp. Hb (9781554580279) Can$85.00. Reviewed by NILS LANGER The concept of Diaspora has received considerable attention in the Humanities over the last 20 years or so, to the extent that at times it can appear too global a term to be of any actual intellectual use (Brubaker 2005). But maybe there is good reason for its wide application to a host of different social setups, geographical locations, and historical time periods, and this book may be testament to the validity of this in the context of German communities across the world. Presenting papers delivered at a conference in 2006 in Waterloo, Canada, the volume contains 39 chapters organized in three broad sections, ‘Identity’, ‘Migration’, and ‘Loss’ and providing a rich overview of how people are affected by the process of migration, either personally or historically. It is therefore no surprise that this book contains much more than ‘straightforward’ sociolinguistic perspectives but also includes studies more at home in Film and Literary Studies, Anthropology, and Social History. Sociolinguists have a natural interest in diasporas since they often provide exciting conditions for the empirical study of language-contact phenomena such as major language change and even language loss. Furthermore, in diasporas we find evidence for the use of particular languages as markers of personal and group identities and studying such diasporas allows us to investigate changes in speaker  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 420 BOOK REVIEWS communities both in real-time and apparent-time. As sociolinguists we are more used to speaking of linguistic enclaves or Sprachinseln (speech islands) than of diasporas when discussing Germans – in itself a highly problematic term when applied to people, ethnicity, and language, both historically and contemporarily – abroad, and there is now a significant body of recent research in German sociolinguistics (e.g. Salmons 1993; Hogan-Brun 2000; Keel and Mattheier 2003; Berend and Knipf-Komlosi 2006; Carl and Stevenson 2009) to elucidate our understanding of life in the German diaspora. Furthermore, a recent fine handbook of German communities in Eastern and Central Europe exists in the form of Eichinger, Plewnia and Riehl (2008). As early as the Middle Ages, German communities migrated as settlers and moved to Eastern Europe. However, it was mostly during the eighteenth century that German-speaking people moved both eastwards to Romania and Hungary, as well as Russia, and westwards to Pennsylvania in order to practise their religious faiths without fear of persecution. During the nineteenth century the majority of emigrants left Germany, mostly for economic reasons, to start a new life in the U.S.A. and also South America. The twentieth century, too, saw waves of emigration from Germany – during the 1930s because of Nazi persecution and the impending war and during the 1940s and 1950s because of the aftermath of the war. After 1989 significant numbers of ethnic Germans moved ‘back’ to Germany from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, obtaining full German citizenship on the basis of their ethnicity, having left Germany a couple of centuries previously. In addition to these economically or religiously motivated migrations we have emigration based on life-style choices, e.g. movements to Australia and New Zealand since the 1970s in order to adopt a healthier and less crowded lifestyle. It is a significant strength of this book that it does not appear to exclude any particular time period, location, or group of migrants from its coverage, and the reader gets a comprehensive, though at times overwhelming, impression of the diversity of German diasporas. The majority of papers deal with Eastern Europe/Russia and North America – thus echoing scholarly emphases over the last decades – but a number of chapters discuss other areas, e.g. Rolf Annas’ chapter on the history of German migration in Paarl (South Africa) or the two chapters on Germans in Australia by Sandra Kipp and Doris Schüpbach respectively. More exotic locations include nineteenth-century Turkey (Christin Pschichholz), where some 3,000 Germans resided and a German-speaking church was established. However, these Germans integrated rather quickly into Turkish society, which poses the problem in this chapter and others (e.g. Gisela Holfter’s discussion of the fate of four German-speaking refugees in the 1930s Ireland or Anne Ribbert’s piece on syntactic borrowing of German students in the Netherlands today) of when or whether the notion of diaspora becomes too stretched: how many migrants do you need to create a distinct community and how structured/distinct does this community need to be for scholars to identify it as a diaspora? The title of the volume – diasporic experiences – suggests that it is justifiable and of merit to include papers which appear to satisfy our  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 BOOK REVIEWS 421 general understanding of diaspora more peripherally than others but the price for such a broad-church approach is that readers may be left overwhelmed by the diversity of scenarios and intellectual angles rather than guided in their understanding. The contributions are grouped into three thematic sections mentioned in the volume’s subtitle and each section is introduced with a more general discussion providing a guiding framework for at least some of the papers following it. The section on Identity is introduced by an overview article by Janet Fuller and is also certainly the one covering topics most familiar or relevant to sociolinguists. The two other sections also contain linguistic analyses but to a more limited extent and a number of chapters provide fairly straightforward accounts of ‘historical facts’ and analyses of emigration in film and literary studies. In the interest of interdisciplinarity, the inclusion of studies from a variety of fields is of course to be welcomed, but this can also have a disorientating effect when the common thread linking such papers is tangential. Here, however, the benefits outweigh the disadvantages: Natasha G. Wiebe’s paper on the semi-autobiographical writings of Di Brandt, an English professor of Mennonite Canadian origin, provides some interesting reflections on what it means to be part of a diasporic community and to break away from it to join the more mainstream culture and thinking; whilst Hanno Sowade’s analysis of the portrayal of refugees from the East in West German films in the 1950s offers a useful reminder of problems faced by Germans ‘returning’ to the motherland, especially when set in contrast to Carsten Würmann’s discussion of the figure of the rich ‘Uncle from America’ in German literature since the eighteenth century. There is, thus, much to be said in favour of publishing such a wide range of topics in one volume and, as with many conference proceedings, some chapters will always appear a little tangential to the main theme or focus of the book. The volume has one major weakness, however, which is that most chapters contain little more than seven or eight pages of actual text (plus two to three for endnotes and bibliography). This would be short at the best of times but, especially in a volume which addresses such a wide range of scholarly disciplines, the brevity of the individual chapters does not allow for much more than a general introduction to the author’s topic. A number of chapters report from studies with a significant body of data, yet only have space for one or two quotations. This is particularly, though not exclusively, lamentable for papers presenting discourse analyses or oral histories. The reviewer understands that, at 528 pages, this book has perhaps reached its physical limits but with most contributions appearing merely to scratch the surface of their topics, some readers will be left unsatisfied with the depth of elucidation derived from reading this work. Nonetheless, this book succeeds in demonstrating what an interdisciplinary approach to a topic can mean and readers will get a genuine impression of how wide-ranging sociological topics such as diaspora are. In the vast majority of papers, quotations and examples have been translated into English  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 422 BOOK REVIEWS so that this book, which has been meticulously edited and presented, will be accessible to readers without any knowledge of German. Whilst some individual chapters may be too brief to be truly insightful, they nonetheless serve as an excellent starting point for further study and, thus, on the whole this book can be recommended as a comprehensive introduction to German Diasporic Experiences. REFERENCES Berend, Nina and Elisabeth Knipf-Komlosi (eds.). 2006. Sprachinselwelten: The World of Language Islands. Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang. Brubaker, Rogers. 2005. The ‘diaspora’ diaspora. Ethnic and Racial Studies 28: 1–19. Carl, Jenny and Patrick Stevenson (eds.). 2009. Language, Discourse and Identity in Central Europe: The German Language in a Multilingual Space. Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave. Eichinger, Ludwig M., Albrecht Plewnia and Claudia Maria Riehl (eds.). 2008. Handbuch der deutschen Sprachminderheiten in Mittel- und Osteuropa. Tübingen, Germany: Narr. Hogan-Brun, Gabrielle (ed.). 2000. National Varieties of German Outside Germany. Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang. Keel, William and Klaus-Peter Mattheier (eds.). 2003. German Language Varieties Worldwide: Internal and External Perspectives. Frankfurt, Germany: Peter Lang. Salmons, Joseph (ed.). 1993. The German Language in America 1681–1993. Madison, Wisconsin: Max Kade Institute. NILS LANGER School of Modern Languages University of Bristol Bristol, BS8 1TE U.K. nils.langer@bris.ac.uk MARGARITA HIDALGO (ed.). Mexican Indigenous Languages at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century (Contributions to the Sociology of Language, 91). 2006. Berlin, Germany: Mouton de Gruyter. 382 pp. Hb (9783110185973) €104.95/$147.00. Reviewed by LILIANA SÁNCHEZ This volume is an excellent contribution to Language Policy studies in general and to Reverse Language Shift studies (Fishman 1991, 2001) in particular. The contributions in the volume range from historical and theoretical approaches to the study of the maintenance of indigenous languages in Mexico to actual implementations of bilingual and intercultural education programs that serve indigenous populations in Mexico. The publication of this volume is very timely because across Latin America there is a growing impulse among indigenous, non-profit and some government organizations to reclaim indigenous languages  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 BOOK REVIEWS 423 as part of the region’s cultural heritage (Sichra 2009) and as a means of constructing more inclusive national identities that accept multiculturalism as an integral part of modern democratic societies (Coronel-Molina and GrabnerCoronel 2005). In a socio-economic context in which multicultural Latin American countries with indigenous populations are experiencing previously unforeseen and relatively stable economic growth, albeit with high levels of inequality, the issue of how to reconcile these emerging economies with social realities that are linguistically and culturally diverse becomes a pressing matter. This volume enriches the current debate on how to achieve this goal by providing historical and contemporary evidence of how language policies have affected and are affecting the development and maintenance of indigenous languages in Mexico. In theoretical terms, several contributions in this volume are framed within the Reverse Language Shift model as a means to understand the stage at which indigenous languages find themselves at the dawn of the 21st Century in Mexico, given a complex history of language policy. Part I focuses on the socio-historic factors that lie behind the current situation of Mexican Indigenous Languages (MIL). After a well articulated introduction by Hidalgo, the second chapter by Parodi proposes a historical view of language shift in Colonial New Spain that shows how the initial policies that allowed the emergence of an Indianized variety of the New World Spanish koiné, as well as its coexistence with indigenous languages, spoken not only by the indigenous populations but also by indianized Spaniards, criollos and mestizos (among them intellectuals such as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz), underwent a major reversal in the late 1700s. Parodi equates these changes to a shift from Stage 2 in the RLS scale (language use in local/ regional media and governmental services) to Stage 6 (domestic uses of the language). This brought about a language shift that favored the Colonial language over the indigenous ones, despite the fact that indigenous languages had been incorporated as part of the new identities formed in the colonial territories. Hidalgo furthers this view in the next two chapters where she focuses on the initial stages of the recovery mission undertaken by religious grammarians and such people as Fray Bernardino de Sahagún whose incredible body of work has as its main goal the exhaustive documentation of language and cultural practices as well as the education of indigenous peoples in their own languages. Hidalgo sees the interruption of the work of such grammarians as the beginning of an enduring process of language shift from Mexican indigenous languages to New World Spanish, a language that gained strength from policies originated in the metropolis in the 1600s. This process is accelerated by demographic changes and by an ever more-generalized bilingualism among indigenous peoples that serves both as a means of achieving language maintenance and adaptation to the hegemonic culture. In this chapter we also find a very interesting view of resistance and confrontation movements (common to different regions of Latin America) that begin in colonial times and find in Mexico a contemporary expression in the neo-zapatista movement of Chiapas.  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 424 BOOK REVIEWS Part II of the book is dedicated to contemporary language policy and demographic trends. Pellicer, Cifuentes and Herrera’s chapter delineates the extent to which the General Law on Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2003) provides a framework for a more inclusive society in crucial areas such as education and mass media. Althoff’s chapter compares the centralized approach to legislation in favor of indigenous languages in Mexico to the localized approach to indigenous language rights that characterizes legislation in the U.S. An extremely rich chapter by Cifuentes and Moctezuma provides an overview of census data from 1970 to 2000 for 27 indigenous languages using four indicators of maintenance and shift: • permanence of speakers of indigenous languages in their place of ancestral settling; • rate of growth of the number of speakers of the language; • rate of bilingualism in the indigenous language and Spanish; and • use of the indigenous language at home. These four factors combined provide a complex picture of growth in terms of the absolute numbers of speakers of indigenous languages but also an inverse relationship between bilingualism and use of indigenous languages at home. Finally, Part III of the book is dedicated to the analysis of bilingualism and bilingual education programs. Messing and Rockwell discuss the role of teachers in bilingual education programs as promoters of Mexicano (Nahuatl) in bilingual schools in Tlaxcala and as agents of changes in attitudes towards the language in the community. This role is of special relevance in a context of advanced language shift. In a very revealing chapter Pfeiler and Zámišova provide an overview of language policies to support the Mayan language since 1940 and compare two bilingual education programs in the Yucatan Peninsula. Their findings show that a ‘language-in-culture apprenticeship’ undertaken by community instructors holds the best prospects for language maintenance. Flores Farfán’s chapter presents an innovative approach to generating culturally-appropriate materials for bilingual Nahuatl speakers. These materials incorporate the oral traditions of Nahuatl communities in innovative ways (amate pictographs, videos narrating traditional stories, riddles). Pellicer’s contribution shows us the complexity of language shift in a context of Mazahua-Spanish bilingualism (at different stages in Fishman’s scale) that is further compounded by the superimposition of English. The last contribution in this volume by Hidalgo presents a historical view of language policy in Mexico. Hidalgo distinguishes three periods: an initial period that indicates reversal of language shift (ca. 1524 – ca. 1580); a major trend of language shift (1580–2000) which she subdivided in three eras (Colony, Independence and Revolution); and what she considers a new era inspired by the neo-Zapatista indigenous movement that begins in 2003 with the passing of the Law on Linguistic Rights of the Indigenous Peoples, a significant step in reversing language shift.  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 BOOK REVIEWS 425 This book provides us with a general overview of the language policies that have shaped the history, the present and the future of Mexican Indigenous Languages. Many aspects of the realities described and analyzed by the contributors to this volume are shared by other indigenous languages in the Americas that are in the process of undergoing language shift. In a historical moment in which the viability of indigenous languages is at stake, this volume is a major contribution to the understanding of the past and the present as a means of constructing a future characterized by the maintenance and further development of the linguistic heritage of the Americas. REFERENCES Coronel-Molina, Serafı́n and Lina Grabner-Coronel. 2005. Lenguas e identidades en los Andes: Perspectivas Ideológicas y Culturales. Quito, Ecuador: Abya-Yala. Fishman, Joshua A. 1991. Reversing Language Shift. Clevedon, U.K.: Multilingual Matters. Fishman, Joshua A. 2001. Can threatened languages be saved? Clevedon, U.K.: Multilingual Matters. Sichra, Inge. 2009. Atlas sociolingüı́stico de pueblos indı́genas en América Latina. Cochabamba, Bolivia: UNICEF and PROIB Andes. LILIANA SÁNCHEZ Department of Spanish and Portuguese Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey 105 George Street New Brunswick, NJ 08901–1414 U.S.A. lsanchez@rutgers.edu YARON MATRAS. Language Contact. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xi + 366 pp. Pb (9780511629761) $38.00. Reviewed by BRAD MONTGOMERY-ANDERSON Yaron Matras states at the beginning of Language Contact that his aim is to ‘restore the centre-stage position of the bilingual speaker as a creative communicator’ (p. 6) in the study of language contact phenomena. Throughout this book he elaborates the theme that the locus of language contact is the individual speaker who selects from a complex repertoire of linguistic structures rather than ‘languages.’ This selection process is guided by the competing motivations of communicative efficiency and contextual appropriateness. The development of this theme provides for a fascinating work on language contact from the perspective of language acquisition processes. Yaron Matras is a Professor of Linguistics in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 426 BOOK REVIEWS of Manchester; his areas of specialization include language areas and language typology. His expertise in the Romani language also affords him a unique perspective on various types of language contact phenomena from a synchronic as well as diachronic perspective. In the first chapter Matras presents a useful literature review on the subject and lays out the three central themes of his work. One of the main purposes is to focus on the role of bilingual speakers as ‘creative communicators’ who employ a number of linguistic resources. These speakers do not shut on and off separate language systems, but rather draw from a complex repertoire of elements. The second theme is the ability of speakers to creatively draw on this repertoire to fit the communicative context. Third, some structures are less prone to conscious control on the part of the speaker, resulting in a leveling of the repertoire; this simplification of the speaker’s repertoire results in the pattern and form replication known as ‘borrowing’. In the second chapter Matras exemplifies these processes as he presents a case study of a boy growing up with exposure to English, German, and Hebrew. The author shows how the child gradually develops an awareness of the different settings in which each language is used. During this development the child has two competing goals: to communicate as effectively as possible using all the linguistics elements available and to make language choices that are appropriate for the situation. Learning separate ‘languages’ is more a matter of socialization, i.e. learning the appropriate domains for employing certain structures and forms. This case is a good starting point for the rest of the book, and Matras later refers back to examples from this study. In Chapter 3, ‘Societal multilingualism’, the author discusses the roles of languages in society as well as the types of policy that societies use to manage linguistic resources. This chapter still has an emphasis on the individual bilingual speaker by starting with a discussion of how the bilingual child gradually matches different social contexts and domains. Matras extends the discussion of bilingualism to a societal level and examines how multilingual societies assign certain languages to certain domains and what kinds of language policies are found in these settings. Chapter 4 explores the process of acquiring two languages. Matras offers here a helpful review of first and second language acquisition, as well as a good discussion of bilingual language processing. The author again de-emphasizes the idea of ‘linguistic systems’ in the bilingual’s mind in favor of the development of a single linguistic repertoire that is sensitive to contextual factors. Matras best summarizes this emphasis on the individual by affirming what Weinreich (1953) defined as ‘the only true locus of language contact – the bilingual speaker’ (p. 99). In this chapter the author continues to explore the idea that bilingual speakers reduce the need to activate the ‘selection and inhibition mechanism’ by consolidating the structures in their linguistic repertoire. Matras’ knowledge of Romani allows him to provide a wealth of fascinating examples for the topic of Chapter 5, ‘Crossing the boundaries: Code-switching in  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 BOOK REVIEWS 427 conversation’. One example that is illustrative of this discussion is an instance of a Romani speaker using the German concessive connector obwohl ‘although’. Matras explains this as an instance where words with grammatical functions can be part of ‘automated task schemas in the “pragmatically dominant” language’ (p. 109). When speaking German the Romani speaker has a high motivation to select only words that will be understood by the German addressee, while when speaking with other Romani who are also bilingual with German the self-monitoring of repertoire-selection is much more relaxed. As a result of these two different scenarios, German becomes the pragmatically dominant language, i.e. discourse markers like ‘although’ may be used in both German and Romani contexts, whereas Romani words may be used in only Romani contexts. Chapter 6 is a general discussion of the phenomenon of borrowing, while Chapters 7 and 8 focus on lexical borrowing and grammatical borrowing. Chapter 6 is a good explanation of the two main approaches to borrowing, i.e. examining factors that facilitate the borrowing, and examining those that motivate it. Matras also explores the idea of scales of borrowability: some words, generally with a grammatical function, are less inclined to borrowing than content words such as nouns. Romani again is illustrative in that it provides an unusual example of borrowing inflectional endings along with the nouns that it borrowed from Greek. Chapter 8 focuses specifically on the borrowability of different grammatical words. Especially intriguing is Matras’ discussion of how discourse markers are at the top of the borrowability scale. These words are outside of the conscious control of the speakers who use them; such forms ‘are often not readily recognised or treated by speakers as genuine word-forms and are perceived as a kind of para-linguistic inventory of gesture-like devices that are exempted from context-bound and inhibition constraints’ (p. 193). Discourse markers are, thus, the example par excellence of using language acquisition processes to exemplify contact-induced language change. Chapter 9 discusses pattern replication and shows how the borrowing of form differs in important ways from the borrowing of structures. This chapter illustrates these processes on a large scale by describing several well-known linguistic areas where non-related languages have grown more alike through centuries of close contact. This examination of convergence provides yet another example of how language processing on an individual level can lead to language change. While the borrowing of word forms can be consciously avoided (out of loyalty to one’s language, for example), the replication of patterns is a process of which speakers are much less aware. Chapter 10 shows how both form and pattern replication are at work to create pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages. Matras offers a well-balanced overview of the properties of such languages as well as theories on how these languages emerge. He rightly points out that the study of creoles, pidgins and mixed languages represents a challenge to the comparative method in historical linguistics. As most of the world’s languages have no past written records we  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011 428 BOOK REVIEWS therefore have ‘no proof for past events that may have led to the scrambling of repertoires . . .’ (p. 307). In his conclusion Matras reiterates his view on language contact by stating that repertoire components of a bilingual speaker cannot ‘be shut down wholesale for the duration of the communicative event’ (p. 308). Language change is the result of a complex mix of competing processing and communicative factors, and Language Contact deftly guides the reader through the explanations of these factors. Matras strikes a healthy balance between synchronic and diachronic perspectives while at the same time offering a wealth of details from a wide variety of languages. While his book is excellent in its own right, it is not quite the comprehensive view of the topic that he presents in the beginning, and the societal level approach to language contact phenomena at times is neglected. A good example of the opposite approach is Sarah Thomason’s Language Contact (2000). Out of that work’s ten chapters, two chapters are devoted to endangered languages and language death, respectively. It seems that in the current work the most glaring consequence of language contact – language death – should have greater emphasis. The role of language attitudes and ideologies also does not seem to receive enough attention, especially given the author’s own statement that, ‘[s]ince borrowing is initiated by individuals, their motivation to borrow is a key toward understanding the process’ (p. 221). Overall there could be more discussion of societal-wide consequences of language contact and more examination of language polices and language conflict. These weaknesses, however, do not detract from this book’s important contribution and the unique perspective it offers. Matras does indeed succeed in his stated goal of bringing a much-needed emphasis on the individual bilingual speaker back to language contact theory. REFERENCES Thomason, Sarah G. 2000. Language Contact: An Introduction. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press. Weinreich, Uriel. 1953. Languages in Contact. The Hague, the Netherlands: Mouton. BRAD MONTGOMERY-ANDERSON Department of Languages and Literature Northeastern State University 609 N. Grand Avenue Tahlequah OK 7446 U.S.A. 88miles@gmail.com  C Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2011