Philippine English: Linguistic and Literary Perspectives edited by Ma. Lourdes S. Bautista and Kingsley Bolton

Journal of Sociolinguistics 15/3, 2011: 398–428

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SINFREE MAKONI AND ALASTAIR PENNYCOOK (eds.). Disinventing and ReconstitutingLanguages. 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 andAlastair Pennycook, is a deeply thought-provoking volume which challengesconventional notions about language, the study of language and languagepolicy. 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 politicsand ideology in Indonesia to the question of indigenous cultural education inBrazil, are engaging and well-written. Particularly rich in terms of their abilityto inspire thought are those chapters authored and co-authored by the editorsthemselves. That noted, I frequently found myself troubled by a tendency onthe part of Makoni and Pennycook as well as some of the other authors in thisvolume:

a. to fail to sufficiently ground their arguments about the hybrid, Creole, fuzzy,shifting, dynamic nature of language within the matrix of socially producedrelations of power;

b. similarly, to push toward sometimes largely uncritical celebration ofhybridity and hybrid language forms, for instance, urban vernaculars andto 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 performidentity(ies) in the ways that they do? What are the larger, complex, but also veryspecific and inevitably hierarchical social relations that, for instance, motivateindividuals to use a particular dialect, hybrid, Creole, or standardized languageform in context A, B, or C – and not to use it in context X, Y or Z? These are someof the crucial questions this volume does not address.

Disinventing and Reconstituting Languages begins with a thoughtful Foreword,‘Intervening discourses, representations and conceptualizations of language’, byOfelia Garcia. As Garcia 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

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away from a focus on language itself and toward how real people use languageand what they do with it.

Makoni and Pennycook lay out their basic arguments and outline the overallaim of the volume in Chapter 1, ‘Disinventing and reconstituting languages’.These revolve around the charge that languages are historical inventions andthat 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 andPennycook focus in particular on Africa and the ways in which colonialconstructions of Africa have shaped (mis)understandings of language in thatcontext. The authors reserve special criticism for scholars and advocates oflinguistic diversity (Skutnabb-Kangas, Romaine and Nettle, etc.), charging thelatter with dealing in ‘reductive’ strategies or ‘enumeration’. Makoni’s andPennycook’s claims that language boundaries are constructs, that language isconstantly changing, and that those categories used to organize understandingsof, and policies in relation to, language(s) are on the mark. However, it’s unclearwhat specific, concrete, workable policies Makoni and Pennycook would proposeto replace those they view as reductive.

Chapter 2, ‘Then there were languages: Bahasa Indonesia was one amongmany’, by Ariel Heryanto, examines the historical invention of ‘Bahasa’ in post-colonial Indonesia. Heryanto introduces some of the major features of vernacularJavanese and Malay, looks at some of the contemporary characteristics of Bahasa,offers some preliminary interpretation of how developmentalism as one form ofuniversalism and practice came to the fore in the historical process, and notessome of the resistance the process has provoked. Heryanto also draws attentionto the important role formal, written forms of language play in the developmentand definition of languages.

In Chapter 3, ‘Critical historiography: Does language planning in Africa needa construct of language as part of its theoretical apparatus’, Sinfree Makoni andPedzisai Mashiri advocate for the adoption of what they call a ‘human linguistics’.Among other things, such an approach involves foregrounding how individualsuse language as well as conceiving of, and approaching, language in the Africancontext in a holistic fashion that acknowledges the widespread reality of themultiplicity, dynamism, fuzziness and overlapping nature of communicationpractices and modes. According to Mashiri and Makoni, the key to culturaland communicative justice lies not in protecting small minority languages fromdisappearance, but in creating spaces and places for the new hybrids that areemerging to thrive – in particular in urban areas where a mixing of languages isperhaps the most pronounced.

As does Mashiri’s and Makoni’s chapter, Pennycook’s Chapter 4, ‘The mythof English as an international language’, forces critical introspection. Drawingon Foucault and Judith Butler, Pennycook seeks to construct language as aperformative act of identity. But is this performative act essentially free-flowing,creative, and inherently agentive in the sense that individuals can basically dowhat they want with language? Or is it largely a bounded performance, one in

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which users must adhere to essentially rigid linguistic practices and roles basedon the context, with the power contexts such as international academia andpublishing – which, for instance, requires Pennycook to write in an Anglo-American standard form of English – one of the most rigid of all of theseperformative contexts? Finally, how does what is (not (allowed to be)) performedin this social context and that one affect the range of (im)possibility elsewhere?Unfortunately, Pennycook does not address these crucial questions, though weare treated to thought-provoking but also primarily abstract theorizing.

Chapter 5, ‘Beyond “language”: Linguistic imperialism, sign languages andlinguistic anthropology’, by Jan Branson and Don Miller, delivers compellingand important critique of traditional historical and contemporary linguistic(mis)approaches to sign language. In addition to biting – and, in this reviewer’sestimation, mostly spot on – critique of conventional approaches to thinkingabout sign language, Branson and Miller provide a useful overview of key historicdevelopments in terms of linguistics and sign language. The authors concludethe chapter with a series of recommendations for linguists and linguistics onhow to approach the study of sign language, with perhaps the most importantof these being the admonition not to assume that that which appears tohold true for spoken and written language necessarily holds true for signlanguage.

Chapter 6, ‘Entering a culture quietly: Writing and cultural survival inindigenous education in Brazil’, by Lynn Mario T. Menezes de Souza, examinessome of the larger questions of the volume through the lens of academicperspectives on, and policy approaches toward, indigenous languages andindigenous groups in Brazil. De Souza draws in particular on the work of HomiBhabha. She focuses on the ways in which the practice of writing – and itsimposition on indigenous languages and language groups – can potentiallyaffect, often in negative fashion, attempts to maintain small, less powerfulindigenous languages.

Chapter 7, ‘A linguistics of communicative activity’, by Steven L. Thorne andJames P. Lantolf, aims to describe historical antecedents that strongly shapedwhat the authors interpret to be a debilitating and ongoing construction oflanguage as a natural object independent of lived communicative activity. Theauthors also seek to provide a synoptic exegesis of models of language that provideusage-based and meaning-centred characterizations of linguistically-mediatedhuman activity. The chapter is well written and provides a good summary andsynthesis of the work of a number of key thinkers vis-a-vis language.

Elaine Richardson’s case study approach in Chapter 8, ‘(Dis)inventingdiscourse: Examples from Black culture and hiphop rap/discourse’, focuses onhiphop discourse as a subgenre and discourse system within ‘the universe’ ofBlack discourse. The central question she explores is how rappers on one handdisplay orientation to their situated, public role as performing products and, onthe 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


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within Black diasporic discourses. The second half focuses on a case study of arap performance by the African American Southern rap group OutKast (CDA).

Chapter 9, ‘Educational materials reflecting heteroglossia: Disinventingethnolinguistic differences in Bosnia-Herzegovina’, by Brigitta Busch and JurgenSchick provides the best illustration of what a specific instance of disinvention andreconstitution might look like. It does so by way of a close examination of a schoolmanual developed by an Austrian NGO that was (and perhaps still is) being usedas a multicultural teaching aid. The manual, called Pogedi: Open Teaching andIntercultural Learning, rejects the neat, ethnic and language boundaries oftenprojected onto the population in Bosnia-Herzegovina in favour of a teachingapproach that highlights hybrid language and cultural forms while also situatingthese forms socially, historically and culturally.

Suresh Canagarajah concludes the volume with Chapter 10, ‘Afterdisinvention: Possibilities for communication, community and competence’.He delivers an inspiring call for more democracy and egalitarianism vis-a-vis English. Of course, he does so in an academic book chapter written ina comparatively rigid, standardized English. When international academicjournals begin accepting articles written in something other than Americanor British Standard written English and when advocates of greater democracyand fluidity of language start pushing for this, and creating more egalitarianlanguage contexts (for instance, at academic conferences), then perhaps itwon’t feel quite so much like the postmodern etherealism it does here andmore like real, concrete, meaningful social change. Why limit disinvention toothers and other contexts outside the academic realm? Why not also disinventand reconstitute language in the least pliable, most hegemonic communicativecontexts, including international (English) publishing? These contextsare arguably disproportionately dominating in terms of their influence on thehegemonic rules of language practice in many other contexts. After all, it is thesepower contexts that are inevitably referred to in arguments about ‘correctness’and in which, for example, the educational documents and items used to teachlanguage are produced.

CHRISTOF DEMONT-HENRICH

School of CommunicationUniversity of Denver2490 S. Gaylord St.

Denver, CO 80208U.S.A.

[email protected]


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ESPERANCA 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 oflanguage and translation. Translation studies have also largely failed to examinethe crucial intersection between media, globalization, language and translation.This significant and troubling gap in scholarship on globalization and media iswhat makes Translation in Global News by Esperanca Bielsa and Susan Bassnettso refreshing – and important. Bielsa and Bassnett step expertly into this gap andbegin to close it quite nicely with a book of considerable theoretical depth andbreadth.

Translation in Global News is easily accessible and relevant for scholarsfrom all disciplines interested in global information flows, global hierarchiesand inequalities, and questions of language and power as these relate tothe complex, ever-changing and frequently cross-cutting social phenomenontypically referred to as ‘globalization’. This is due in part to the inherently inter-disciplinary nature of examining the role of language and translation in newsand in part to the authors’ writing, which does not slip into the use of exclusivedisciplinary jargon.

The book opens with an ‘Introduction’ chapter in which the authors lay outthe rationale for the book, namely the dearth of research into translation andnews as well as the general lack of inter-disciplinary research and awareness inthis area.

Chapter 1, ‘Power, language and translation’, lays out some of the basicdebates about translation and how to define it. The chapter also draws attentionto the central and often overlooked role of the translator in news, who the authorspersuasively contend, does far more than engage in direct and literal linguistictranslation (something which Bielsa and Bassnett, in any case, rightly rejectas impossible). Especially interesting is the authors’ discussion of two differentapproaches to translation – domestication and foreignization. Domesticationentails customizing a translation so that it is considered a good fit for thelocal culture and language into which it is being translated. This approachrenders invisible the translator, the translation process and, potentially, culturaldifference as well. Foreignization is a counter-hegmonic approach to translation.It seeks to remain true to the original cultural frame of the translated workand, because it does, ideally ends up drawing readers’ attention to significantdifferences in cultural paradigms.

Bielsa and Bassnett devote Chapter 2, ‘Globalization and translation’, to anoverview of various theories and definitions of globalization from some of the well-known theorists including: Manuel Castells, Anthony Giddens, David Harvey,


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Scott Lash and John Urry, and Saskia Sassen. Bielsa and Bassnett latch inparticular onto Sassen’s work on ‘global cities’, which they favor because ofits focus on the concrete instances in which the local and global intermix. Infact, Bielsa and Bassnett’s case study of two international news agency officesin Latin America later in the book clearly reflects their affinity for a Sassen-likeconceptualization of globalization.

As the title indicates, Chapter 3, ‘Globalization and news: The role of thenews agencies in historical perspective’, offers a detailed historical overviewof the rise of global news agencies with a special concentration on Reuters, aBritish-based agency, and Agence France-Presse (AFP). Drawing in particularfrom the work of Oliver Boyd-Barrett, Bielsa and Bassnett chart the material,political-economic and technological contours of the rise of large news agenciessuch as Reuters and AFP and their eventual transformation into truly globalmedia agencies with their own network of journalists situated around theglobe.

In Chapter 4, ‘Translation in global news agencies’, Bielsa and Bassnettexamine and outline some of the basic practices and norms of journalists, inparticular those of the editors who work for international news agencies inforeign bureaus. The authors also establish a typology of major features in newstranslation as well as a list of different types of textual intervention performed byjournalists who translate news.

Chapter 5, ‘Journalism and translation: Practice, strategies and values in thenews agencies’, forms the empirical core of the book. Here, Bielsa and Bassnettdiscuss the case studies upon which much of their book is based. The AFP LatinAmerican bureau located in Montevideo, Uruguay and the Inter Press Service(IPS) Latin American bureau in the same city, serve as the comparative casestudies. While AFP represents a global mainstream news agency, IPS standsas an example of an alternative media organization. Despite the fact that theyspend a good portion of their time translating, journalists, especially those atAFP, typically do not conceive of themselves as translators.

Also in Chapter 5, the authors discuss an example of the difficulty theMontevideo AFP editors had in translating stories originally written for anAmerican/European audience about the death of Ronald Reagan, whichoccurred during the time the case study was conducted. The copy that cameacross the wire in English to the bureau editors portrayed Reagan in warm,fuzzy terms. However, this was not necessarily the way many in Latin Americathought of the former U.S. president. Thus, the translation process involvedtaking out some of the fluffier information – for example, information about thelast look Reagan gave his wife Nancy before he died – and adding historicalbackground about U.S./Latin American relations during the Reagan era entirelymissing from the original content. This example clearly illustrates the authors’maxim that news translation involves both linguistic and cultural translationand adaptation.


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Bielsa and Bassnett move from news production research in Chapter 5 totextual analysis in Chapter 6, ‘Reading translated news: An analysis of agencytexts’. Here, they compare different language versions of the same news storyand 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 bothtranslation and to cultural reinterpretation/framing, drawing in particular fromHabermas’ ideas of truth, appropriateness and sincerity.

Translation in Global News is a very good book. However, it would bestrengthened by the addition of a couple of components. First, given the authors’general reflexivity and their insistence on the significance of drawing attentionto the translation process, it would have been nice to see Bielsa and Bassnettdiscuss and reflect on their own language backgrounds as well as the processes oftranslation they went through in producing the book. Second, given the authors’call for additional research into translation and news near the beginning of thebook, it would have made sense for them offer some specific suggestions on areas,questions, issues, problems for future research at the conclusion. Certainly, thereis much research potential in global media and translation. For instance, Bielsaand Bassnett never really get to the fascinating issue of the increasing prevalenceof English as global auxiliary language in global media. What is the historyof – or the potential cultural, political and economic ramifications of – a trendwhich can see, for example, a German-speaking journalist interview a Russiansource in English and translate the information and quotes he or she gleansfrom the source back into German? Or, alternatively, what are some of thepolitical economic as well as cultural considerations that come into play interms of large news organizations and their decisions to publish content inparticular languages on their web sites? Which languages do they use, why,how much of their content gets translated into which of these languages, orwhich languages see more content translated from a source and/or auxiliarylanguage?

In the end, Translation in Global News is both an informative and enjoyableread. It advocates for, and practices, interdisciplinarity, and it focuses onan extremely under-studied and far too often overlooked aspect of globalnews production, distribution and consumption: language and translation. It’sshameful that globalization, media and international communication scholars,on the whole, tend to gloss over, pretty much completely, the crucial issuesof language and translation. Much of this lack of interest in language andtranslation may be rooted in disciplinary parochialism. Language, in the mindsof many media and communication scholars, is the province of linguistics.In fact, as Bielsa and Bassnett so persuasively illustrate, the study of mediaand globalization is fundamentally interdisciplinary. Hopefully, some of theglobalization and media and international communication scholars who shouldread this book will indeed encounter it and read it. They will not be disappointedif they do, and it may well inspire at least some to reconsider their previousperspective on language and translation, a perspective that views language


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and translation in terms which render them essentially, and problematically,invisible.

CHRISTOF DEMONT-HENRICH

School of CommunicationUniversity of Denver2490 S. Gaylord St.

Denver, CO 80208U.S.A.

[email protected]

GEOFFREY HUGHES. Political Correctness: A History of Semantics and Culture (TheLanguage 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 onething 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-apartheidSouth 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 thefocus of attention from historical events to words to literary texts gives PoliticalCorrectness 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 unifiedhistory of PC thought and language, and in trying to construct a single narrativefrom such heterogeneous material he does not always make clear distinctionsbetween different societies, eras and political commitments.

The main body of the text (excluding the preface and conclusion) is dividedinto four parts of two chapters each. The first part deals with PC as a culturalphenomenon, first attempting to define the concept and then tracing the historyof the ‘PC debate’ that began in the early 1990s. The second and third partsfocus on language, or more exactly terminology. The second part, titled ‘Thesemantic aspect’, contains one chapter about the codification of word meaningin dictionaries and usage guides, and a second, much shorter one in which apolitically correct ‘word field’ is identified. In the third part, ‘Zones of controversy’,Hughes goes on to examine the development of specific terms, beginning inChapter 5 with expressions relating to race, ethnicity and nationality, thenmoving on in Chapter 6 to gender, sexuality, disability, religion, the environmentand animal rights.

The fourth part takes up a theme that has run throughout the book – theidea that the political correctness of the late-20th/21st century has parallels in


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earlier periods of history. Drawing on canonical works of English literature fromChaucer to Dickens, Hughes shows that the attitudes targeted by modern PCgo back many centuries, and points out that some writers in all ages contestedor satirized the orthodox beliefs and verbal shibboleths of their time. His focuson literature does not however give him much scope to examine more directhistorical antecedents to modern PC, such as John Stuart Mill’s objections to thegeneric masculine in the mid-19th century, and a series of campaigns relatingto 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, thefirst and most intractable difficulty I had concerned the perennial problemof definition. Hughes offers a number of general definitions for the conceptof political correctness, but there is no parallel definition of politically correctlanguage. Instead he offers, in Chapter 4, an indicative list of some 200 lexicalitems which are said to constitute the PC ‘word field’, explaining that theseterms 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). Thefirst two of these criteria are relatively straightforward (leaving aside argumentsabout whether some of the terms were ever actually used without irony byanyone), but the last is more problematic. Theoretically unsatisfactory (becausethe characteristics it appeals to have not been clearly specified, giving it a circularor tautological quality), in practice it leads to the inclusion of many termswhose ‘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, globalwarming and passive smoking.

Hughes might reply that the terms on his list show one or both of thecharacteristics most often identified by commentators as key features of PClanguage, namely abstraction and euphemism. But even if one accepted thatall PC terms are abstractions/euphemisms, it would not logically follow thatall abstractions/euphemisms are PC. If PC is understood as an umbrella-term for a collection of basically left-wing ‘-isms’ – socialism, feminism, anti-racism/imperialism and (increasingly) environmentalism – then many of theeuphemisms on Hughes’s list could not be further from PC. Ethnic cleansing, forinstance, was the creation of ultra-nationalists in former Yugoslavia; collateraldamage and rendition originated as military jargon; genetically modified, accordingto Guy Cook (2004), was promoted by corporate interests looking for a blandalternative to genetically engineered; freedom fries was coined by U.S. conservativesas a patriotic substitute for French fries after the French proved less thanenthusiastic in their support for the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’. Perhaps Hugheswants to show that he himself has no political bias by taking examples from acrossthe global political spectrum. But a category of PC which can accommodatepositions as disparate as those of Susan Sontag and Slobodan Milosevic is notso much even-handed as incoherent. If the P in PC does not stand for anyparticular kind of politics, does the concept not become so elastic as to bemeaningless?


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Hughes never spells out where in the above-mentioned spectrum he wouldplace himself, but his views can be inferred from his paraphrases of and commentson other people’s. He is in favour of civility (thus, in his view, it is no bad thingif we are less tolerant than we once were of racist epithets and other expressionsof gross prejudice), but opposed to censorship, euphemistic obfuscation, andcoinages which he regards as ‘curious’ or ‘absurd’ (e.g. ableism, significant other).He persistently takes it that the reader will share his own understanding ofwhat is offensive and why. He or she will simply agree, for instance, that theacronym DWEM (‘dead white European male’) is no less objectionable thanany term habitually used to disparage a non-white group. If you don’t happento share Hughes’s assumptions, you may well find his treatment of the relevantlexical 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 PClanguage in Verbal Hygiene, Cameron 1995.)

Political differences aside, though, Hughes makes some assertions aboutcurrent English usage which I think are just factually wrong. Here, I will pickout one example where it seems to me that a closer examination of the linguisticfacts 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 withcancer’ is categorized as unacceptable. ‘Clearly’, Hughes comments, ‘there is nolonger a free choice in the use of natural language in relation to disease becauseof certain agendas which have developed around AIDS’.

The first thing that is wrong with this analysis is that ‘living with cancer’ isby no means unacceptable. A Google search for the phrase produces 352,000results, with the vast majority of examples occurring in texts produced byand/or for cancer patients. Quite possibly (though the speculation would needto be confirmed by historical investigation) ‘living with cancer’ was coined byanalogy with the already-established ‘living with HIV/AIDS’. But their apparentequivalence in contemporary discourse points to the second thing that is wrongwith Hughes’s analysis: he does not entertain the possibility that these ‘livingwith . . .’ formulations might be neither politically-motivated denials of thecatastrophic effects of the AIDS epidemic nor euphemisms sanitizing the realityof incurable disease, but acknowledgements of a new reality brought about byrecent medical advances. HIV and some cancers are among the illnesses which,though they still cannot be cured, can now be successfully managed: ratherthan facing imminent death, many patients diagnosed with these conditionswill stay alive, and perhaps well, for long periods. People in this position aremore accurately described as ‘living with X’ than ‘dying of X’. If the first isno more than a euphemism for the second, then maybe we should classify allreferences to people ‘living’ as euphemisms, since they obscure the unpleasantbut 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 ‘livingwith cancer’ has become a shibboleth in certain kinds of discourse, used pointedly


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and repeatedly where other expressions would have been more natural. In short,I agree with Hughes that this usage carries ideological baggage. But whereas hesupposes that this baggage must be PC, the fact that it is as noticeable in discourseon cancer as in the much more politicized discourse of HIV-AIDS reinforces myown suspicion that it is not political in the manner of PC, but has more to do withthe cultural pervasiveness of therapeutic ideologies which promote self-help and‘positive thinking’. In her recent critique of positive thinking (which was partlyinspired by her own experience of cancer treatment), Barbara Ehrenreich (2009)traces its origins to the 19th century ‘New Thought’ movement, which aroseas a reaction against the dominant puritan strain in U.S. culture (it produced,among other things, Christian Science). This does suggest an abstract link toPC, which has often been described as a modern secular Puritanism. But ifPC and positive thinking at some level spring from a common root – whichmay explain why some of their surface manifestations, including their verbalhygiene practices, look similar – they are nevertheless different branches of thetree. A good scholarly history would get beneath the surface to probe theirsimilarities and differences, rather than treating them as self-evidently ‘thesame’.

Finally, though, we should not underestimate the difficulty of writing a goodscholarly history of PC. All attempts to date have been open to the chargeof having some sort of political axe to grind, but whereas that problem willpresumably disappear given time, there will always be a non-trivial problemwith the sources available to historians. Much of the evidence concerning, forinstance, when PC terms were first introduced and how they were used, issimply not accessible: this applies not only to the unrecorded speech of counter-cultural communities of practice, but also to many written sources – politicalephemera like letters, diaries, flysheets and pamphlets. Even where these textshave survived, they have tended not to be sampled by dictionary-makers and thecompilers of major research corpora, precisely because they are not consideredrepresentative. Hughes takes many of his examples from reference sources towhich this point is relevant, such as the OED and the BNC; others come fromnews 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 ageneral audience, are not always convincing to a former grassroots activistlike me. In some cases my scepticism is justified by documentary evidencefrom my own personal archive, but in most it is my counter-cultural memoryagainst Hughes’s mainstream sources, and both have obvious inadequacies andbiases.

Hughes cannot reasonably be criticized for not transcending the limitations ofthe evidence-base he had to work with. But I do not think it is unreasonable towant 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 tothe challenge.


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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 CollegeUniversity of Oxford

Oxford OX1 2HB

[email protected]

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) wasreleased in 2002, this was probably heralded in the World Englishes communityas another welcome addition to the growing family of ICE-corpora. The authorof Contemporary Indian English: Variation and Change might have felt differentlyat the time. Andreas Sedlatschek had been compiling his own corpus of IndianEnglish (IndE) for his study, and the release of ICE-India must have caused aserious crisis of doubt in the purpose of his project. However, Sedlatschek decidedto carry on regardless, and he has made the most of his predicament.

Sedlatschek’s project is to provide a descriptive account of contemporaryIndE that goes beyond what he labels the ‘feature list approach’ to IndE inbeing firmly empirical. In order to test the validity of many statements about‘typical Indianisms’, he compiled his ‘Primary Corpus’ consisting of overall180,000 words, with roughly 80,000 words of press texts from national Indiannewspapers and another 80,000 words of broadcast transcriptions representingthe ‘standard usage range’ (p. 42) of written and spoken IndE. The selectionof press texts was also made to allow comparison with the earlier Kolhapurcorpus 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 allowshim to include a diachronic perspective (LOB and BROWN contain texts fromthe sixties, FLOB and FROWN from the nineties of the last century) as well as to


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consider possible shifts in exonormative orientation, away from BrE to AmE. Theremaining 20,000 words were supplied by student essays ‘to strike a balancebetween the heavily edited press genres and the broadcast material’ (p. 43). Thiscorpus forms the empirical backbone of the study. Additionally, Sedlatschekoccasionally draws on data from ICE-India when it comes to the frequency of aparticular feature in spoken vs. written IndE. He has further used ‘“snapshots”from the Internet’ (p. 44) to supplement his Primary Corpus when it proved toolimited in size. These internet ‘snapshots’ are also highly useful to assess thestatus of a particular form as ‘Indianism’, ‘South Asianism’ or as belonging tothe 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 possibleexplanatory parameter should not go uncorrected: Hindi is not India’s nationallanguage; the Indian constitution proclaims Hindi merely to be the officiallanguage of the Union – a more than nominal difference particularly for Indiansliving below the Hindi belt.

The individual IndE features to be investigated are distilled from an exhaustivesurvey of available descriptions of IndE, including Indian usage guides for English,handbooks of varieties of English as well as more in-depth studies of particularphenomena. The corpus evidence concerning these features is then discussedin 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 ofword formation said to be typical for IndE and some instances of semanticchange concerning individual lexical items. A subchapter deals with ‘lexicalstyle 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 ofBrE vs. AmE with respect to spelling and vocabulary (e.g. rubbish vs. garbage) isconsidered. The chapter offers a wealth of individual observations about the IndElexicon. Many of Sedlatschek’s findings prove earlier accounts to be downrightwrong or at least sloppy in that they claim a much wider usage range for a specificexpression than attested in actual language use across registers. However, someof his concerns in this chapter may fail to fully impress the reader, such asthe observation that lathicharge (‘police attack with a bamboo baton’) occurswithout a hyphen in the South Indian newspaper The Hindu, but with a hyphenin the North Indian The Tribune. Whether such differences really are ‘a sourceof variation and differentiation in written IndE’ (p. 146) or just indicative of aspecific house style remains to be seen.

The chapter on lexicosyntax is the shortest of the three main empirical chaptersand covers two main topics, namely variation in the realm of particle verbs andverb complementation patterns. These topics have been tackled by quite a fewquantitative studies over the last years, and Sedlatschek’s data lead him to similarconclusions, namely that the differences between IndE and other varieties of


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English in this realm ‘are rarely of a qualitative, more often of a quantitative andregister-specific kind’ (p. 195).

The largest chapter on IndE (morpho-)syntax covers an impressive range offeatures. Some of the topics included here belong to the most widely discussedaspects of IndE syntax, for example the variation in article use or the lack ofinversion in questions. Other topics such as the mandative subjunctive haveso far not featured prominently in research on IndE. Some chapters go beyonda purely quantitative analysis of the distribution of a specific feature and lookcloser at the meanings and functions in context. Not surprisingly, forms andfeatures 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 perhapsonly natural that such a motley array of different linguistic features doesnot lend itself to an analysis from a more coherent theoretical perspective.Sedlatschek is very considerate in avoiding rash overgeneralizations whenthese are not supported by his data, and generally refrains from monocausalexplanations. However, sometimes the cumulative character of his explanationsleads to apparent contradictions. When interpreting the IndE data on verbalconcord with collective nouns such as committee or government, for example,Sedlatschek first considers the IndE preference for singular verbal concord asan indicator ‘that IndE, like New Zealand English, is more advanced thanBrE in this process, possibly under the influence from contemporary AmE’(p. 249). The data showing that BrE press texts display a higher incidenceof variable concord with collective nouns than IndE press texts are thenexplained ‘as a repercussion of a BrE “affectation” typical of the late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries’ (p. 249), and ‘IndE was independent enougharound that time not to be affected by these developments’ (p. 256). Elsewhere,however, Sedlatschek explains specific features as ‘remnants of nineteenth-century English’ (p. 196), calling the IndE ‘independence’ into question.Similarly, higher proportions of non-standard usages in the student essays arefrequently accounted for by reference to the ‘acquisitional context’, i.e. learnererrors, but when the student essays show lower frequencies of a particularfeature, as is the case with e.g. interrogative inversion in embedded contexts,this is then attributed to a ‘high degree of exonormatively oriented scholasticmediation in this particular instance’ (pp. 296–297). Why ‘scholastic mediation’should be so successful in precisely this realm of English syntax but not in othersis left unspecified.

The conclusion addresses the question of how ‘different’ IndE really is. To putit differently: what does the evidence accumulated in the book tell us about thestatus of IndE as an autonomous variety in its own right? Sedlatschek insists onacknowledging IndE’s ‘independent development [. . .] it is not a copy of any otherEnglish and should not be treated as such’ (p. 314). He also takes up a proposalmade in the literature to ‘treat IndE as a semi-autonomous variety of English


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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 theimpact of L1 interference on IndE supports the view that interference from Indianlanguages should be a major driving force for syntactic variation’ (p. 313). Thisis a point that is highly likely to be taken up by other researchers working in thefield. After all, Sedlatschek concedes that ‘the impact of L1 interference affectsIndE differently across different text categories and registers’ (p. 313). Studies incontact linguistics have typically turned to spontaneous conversations as thosecontexts which prompt multilingual speakers to draw spontaneously on all thelinguistic resources that are available to them, and this register was notablyabsent from Sedlatschek’s corpus.

To conclude: the study puts many of the ‘typical Indianisms’ that have beenhanded down from textbook to textbook into perspective and, thus, representsan invaluable update on the available descriptive accounts of IndE. The bookwill also serve as an indispensable point of reference for further corpus-basedresearch on IndE. Anybody planning a new edition of an IndE usage guide or ahandbook of World Englishes would be well advised to consult Sedlatschek first.

CLAUDIA LANGE

Institut fur AnglistikJustus-Liebig-Universitat Giessen

GiessenGermany

[email protected]

PINGALI SAILAJA. Indian English (Dialects of English). Edinburgh, U.K.: EdinburghUniversity Press. 2009. 172 pp. Pb (9780748625956) £16.99.

Reviewed by DAVID DETERDING

Like other volumes in the Dialects of English series published by EdinburghUniversity Press, this book on Indian English (IE) has an introductory chaptersetting the scene, followed by one chapter each on the variety’s phonetics andphonology, morphosyntax, and lexis and discourse. There is then a concludingchapter on the history and current changes in IE, followed by an annotatedbibliography of the major works on IE and finally some sample texts of IE throughhistory and also the transcripts of two spoken monologues by Indian women,Ira and Deepta. The recordings of these two monologues, lasting for 50 and 151seconds respectively, are available from a dedicated website.

One thing that is a little unusual about this volume is that the history of Englishin 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 initialchapter, to provide some background for the rest of the material. But perhaps


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it does make sense to combine a discussion of the history with an evaluation ofcurrent changes in IE, and locating this material at the end of the book results inthe concluding chapter finishing quite neatly by offering a glimpse into possiblefuture trends.

In all of the chapters, there is a careful but succinct consideration of the featuresof IE, and most of the material is well researched and presented. However,one disappointing aspect is how rarely the observed features of IE are placedin context, particularly by reference to the texts and recordings in the finalchapter of the book. Although it is true that the two transcribed audio recordingstogether only last for less than three and a half minutes, which would certainlybe 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 featuresof pronunciation outlined in Chapter 2. For example, we are told (p. 21) that /�/is generally absent and a plosive is used instead, and this observation would havebeen enriched by reference to the pronunciation of that with an initial plosiveby Ira (at a location two seconds from the start of the recording). Similarly, inthe discussion of a long monophthong [o:] rather than a diphthong in wordssuch as no, go and groan (p. 25), it would have been valuable to mention themonophthongal 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 audiorecordings, 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 contextfor 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 outof context. For example, stir is given as an IE equivalent of ‘strike’ and clever asmeaning ‘intelligent, especially cunning’ (p. 68), but these examples would onlyreally make sense if they were put in context. As it is, many of the lexical itemsend up as lists of words, and in some cases the special nature of the way thewords are used in IE remains obscure. Furthermore, when some interestingdata 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 itfrom the transcript of a recording? If so, how was it recorded?

Quite apart from this absence of context for the examples, there are a fewproblems with the phonology as presented in Chapter 2. Firstly, representingan aspirated plosive as /ph/ is not ideal; surely /p�/, using a proper raisedsymbol to indicate aspiration, would have been better. Then, on page 23, weare told that ‘sometimes words with wh- are aspirated’, with the result thatwhy can be pronounced as ‘/vhai/ or /whai/’, and this concept of an aspiratedapproximant is rather unusual in phonetic description, where aspiration is morecommonly associated with plosives. Finally, throughout Chapter 2, the selectionof phonemic // slashes or phonetic [ ] brackets seems to be almost random. Forexample, we are told that /θ/ may be ‘dental plosives /t1/ or /t 1h/’ (p. 21), and itwould have been better if the alternative realisations (allophones) were shown insquare brackets. Then we are informed that ‘[p] in pin, upon, suppose is aspirated’


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(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 orbrackets 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 longvowel followed by at least one consonant’ and then we are told that ‘stress fallson 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 clearlyseem to have an extra heavy second syllable. Maybe this is just a typographicalerror, and the intention was to show the second syllable as stressed.

One thing that is occasionally troubling is that some features are claimed forIE when in fact they can be found in many varieties of standard English. Forexample:

• 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 clustersimplification (p. 29), but it is well known that this occurs in RP BritishEnglish if the next word begins with a consonant (Cruttenden 2008:303);

• committee member is suggested as a creation of IE (p. 78), but again thereseems nothing unusual about this; and

• maths is given as a clipping from mathematics (p. 83) when this is actually thenorm in Britain.

Despite a few questionable items such as these, most of the material is carefullypresented, and this slim volume represents a valuable overview of the features,history and status of IE. Inevitably, in such a compact description, further detailsmight have been valuable, not just to offer some context for the features thatare described, but also to elaborate on various issues, especially in the finalchapter 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 sameparagraph we are told ‘Most people think that Hindi is the national languageof India and this myth has been continuously perpetrated. In fact, it was meantto be, and remains, an official language.’ It might have helped to explain thismore fully, particularly to highlight the difference between the official languageand an official language, and also to elaborate a bit on the difference betweenan official language and a national language. Then it is stated (p. 112) that, aspart of the three-language policy that was promoted, ‘If the native language wasHindi, another modern Indian language was to be learnt, preferably one from thesouth.’ Although this is certainly accurate, it might have been useful to discuss itfurther by noting that in some places the spirit of the three-language policy wasdefeated when students opted for Sanskrit or Urdu instead of a southern Indianlanguage (Amritavalli and Jayaseelan 2007: 76). And a little elaboration would


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also have been useful when reference is made of Boxwallah English (p. 112) butwe learn nothing more about it. If Boxwallah English is worth mentioning, onemight have thought that a sentence or two stating what it is would have beenvaluable.

Finally, there are a few places where additional evidence would have helpedto 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? Thisseems to conflict with much work in World Englishes today which observesthat all language varieties are subject to constant change, and furthermorethat there is a tendency for Englishes to evolve. For example, Schneider (2007:161–173) traces the development of English in India and suggests that thereare indications that it is moving into the fourth phase of a five-phase cycle ofits evolution into a fully mature, autonomous variety of English. Then, later inthe final chapter, it is stated that Hindi has managed to gain a position as auseful language throughout the country ‘not because of educational efforts butalmost completely due to Bollywood’ (p. 118), but no evidence is provided tosupport this sweeping conclusion. How can we be sure that Bollywood really hashad such a powerful influence and that the educational system has had almostnone?

Despite a few issues such as these, the book contains plenty of valuableinformation that is carefully collated – even if some of the phonological analysismight be questioned, it would have enriched the material throughout the book topresent more of the features in context, and the explanation is rather succinct ina few places. Overall the material is well presented and the book will undoubtedlyprove 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 LinkGadong, BE1410

BRUNEI

[email protected]


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MA. LOURDES S. BAUTISTA AND KINGSLEY BOLTON (eds.). Philippine English: Linguisticand Literary Perspectives (Asian Englishes Today). Hong Kong: Hong KongUniversity Press. 2008. 405 pp. Hb (9789622099470) $60.28.

Reviewed by DAVID DETERDING

This book consists of an introduction by the editors followed by eighteen chaptersthat provide an overview of the current status and use of English languageand literature in the Philippines, and finally an extensive list of bibliographicalresources. It is divided into three parts:

• the first offers a sociolinguistic context, in particular discussing attitudestowards English in the Philippines;

• part two has the title ‘Linguistic Forms’, and it gives a linguistic analysis ofsome 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 Gonzalesgives a sociolinguistic and historical overview of the use of English in thePhilippines. In Chapter 2, Allan Bernardo discusses English in the educationsystem, describing the implementation of the bilingual program and also currentcontroversies over the use of English. Chapter 3, by Danilo Dayag, considersEnglish-language media in the Philippines and shows how lots of publishedmaterial involves code-switching. In Chapter 4, Ruanni Tupas discusses issueswith postcolonial discourse, while Chapter 5 by D. Manarpaac challenges theadoption of Filipino as the national language of the Philippines, particularlybecause 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 wholecountry. In the final chapter of the first part, Vincente Rafael discusses the roleof Taglish – Tagalog sprinkled with various words from English – in literature,films, and comics, especially how it can provide a voice for the non-elite membersof society, often as a means of protest against those in power.

The second part of the book consists of five chapters. In the first, CurtisMcFarland provides an overview of the indigenous languages of the Philippinesand then considers how Tagalog has been influenced by borrowing fromEnglish. In Chapter 8, Ma. Lourdes Tayao analyses the vowels, consonants andsuprasegmentals of acrolectal, mesolectal and basilectal Philippine English. InChapter 9, Kingsley Bolton and Susan Butler discuss how lexical borrowings fromTagalog and other indigenous languages are represented in English dictionariesin the Philippines, and they are particularly critical of the widely-used Webster’sdictionary which lists many archaic borrowings but fails to include many recentwords with widespread usage. Chapter 10, by Ma. Lourdes Bautista, comparesthe frequency of occurrence of some grammatical patterns in the componentsof the International Corpus of English (ICE) from the Philippines, Hong Kong,Singapore and Great Britain. In Chapter 11, Jane Lockwood, Gail Forey and


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Helen Price consider the language used by workers in call centers in thePhilippines and how breakdowns in communication can occur when they aretalking 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 werememorized by generations of Philippine students, and the influence that this hashad on their English. In Chapter 13, Lily Rose Tope illustrates how modern writersin the Philippines use English to explore their local rhythms and cadences, andshe observes that such explorations in the use of English are no longer always seenas deviant. The next three chapters consider different literary genres. Chapter14, by Gemino Abad, describes how Philippine poetry evolved through threestages, from an initial romantic style through a formalist stage and finally to amature, post-modern style free from the constraints of formalism; Chapter 15, byCristina Hidalgo, deals with the English short story, a medium in which Filipinowriters have excelled; and in Chapter 16, Caroline Hau considers the Filipinonovel in English. In Chapter 17, the literature of the Filipino diaspora is discussedby Alfred Yuson. Finally, Chapter 18 provides a transcript of three people,Simeon Dumdum, Timothy Mo and Resil Mojares, talking about the tradition ofcreative writing in English in the Cebuano region.

Throughout the book, there is plenty of interesting material most of which isclearly presented. For example:

• the detailed analysis of the language of the media in Chapter 3 presentssome substantial data and is carefully tabulated to show that, while the moreserious media tends to be in English, popular publications such as gossipmagazines tend to be in Tagalog or other indigenous languages;

• in Chapter 7, there is a substantial comparison of the lexicon, phonology andsyntax of various Philippino languages, including Tagalog, Bikol, Hiligaynonand Cebuano, and while it is not immediately clear how this is relevant forEnglish in the Philippines, it does provide some kind of background for thesubsequent discussion of borrowing from English in Tagalog;

• Chapter 9 offers a detailed and authoritative discussion about the failureof modern dictionaries to reflect current usage in Philippine Englishaccurately;

• in Chapter 10, careful analysis of some of the different components of the ICEcorpus shows that the widespread use of wherein in the Philippines contrastswith the almost complete absence of the word in Singapore, Hong Kong andthe UK (p. 210); and

• in Chapter 11, there is an interesting analysis of the breakdownin communication in call-center interactions, including some valuabletranscripts of problematic conversations between Philippine call-centerworkers and their American customers.

In some cases, however, the presentation of the data leaves one wishing thatmore details had been given or that there had been greater elaboration of some of


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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 alittle mysterious – an example or two would have helped; and on the same pagewe are told that there is a ‘variable lack of distinction between the roundedand unrounded mid-back vowels /o/ and /ɔ/’, which is equally confusing asboth of these vowels are usually regarded as rounded. Then on page 59 we aretold that the editorials in Philippine English newspapers are characterised bythree obligatory moves, namely Establishing Common Ground, Making a Claim,and Issuing a Counterclaim, but it is a little hard to interpret this fully withoutmore information about how it differs from the structure of editorials found inother varieties of English. Finally, on pages 144 and 147 we are presented withsome fascinating extracts of Taglish, illustrating widespread mixing betweenTagalog and English; but are these real examples or are they invented? And ifthey are real, why are we not given a few more details about how the data wascollected?

One other issue that occasionally interferes with the presentation of materialis that some of the language used is surprisingly prescriptive for a work thatwe assume is intended to describe rather than criticize Philippine English. Forexample:

• it is suggested that ‘errors’ committed by the current generation of Englishteachers ‘are fossilized’ (p. 22);

• we are told about ‘faulty article usage’, ‘faulty preposition usage’ and ‘faultynoun usage’ (p. 58);

• there is mention of ‘correct stress’ (p. 164), which syllable ‘stress should fallon’ (p. 165) and the absence of falling intonation ‘in questions where it wascalled for’ (p. 167);

• it is suggested that use of such in Philippine and Hong English ‘appears to bedeviant’ (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 insome 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 languagecompetence’ (p. 23), which seems to indicate uncritical acceptance of claims thatstandards of English have fallen in recent years; and there is an assumption of ‘thelevel of English-language proficiency in the country having steadily deteriorated’(p. 308). But what actual evidence is there that competence in English hasdeclined? Was there ever really a golden age in the past when everyone spokeand wrote better? In fact, given the booming call-center industry which insiststhat its workers speak excellent English so that they can communicate efficientlywith customers in the U.S.A., one might assume that standard English withclear articulation is actually becoming more widespread in the Philippines, at


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least in the region around Manila where most of the call-center industry isbased.

In conclusion, despite a few blemishes such as these, with some cases whereadditional information or elaboration would have helped, with inappropriateprescriptive language cropping up in a few places, and the occasional assumptionof falling proficiency in English with no supporting evidence, this book containsa wealth of varied material about English in the Philippines which many readerswill undoubtedly find exceptionally valuable.

DAVID DETERDING

Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS)University of Brunei Darussalam (UBD)

Jalan Tungku LinkGadong, BE1410

BRUNEI

[email protected]

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 Humanitiesover the last 20 years or so, to the extent that at times it can appear too global aterm to be of any actual intellectual use (Brubaker 2005). But maybe there is goodreason for its wide application to a host of different social setups, geographicallocations, and historical time periods, and this book may be testament to thevalidity of this in the context of German communities across the world. Presentingpapers delivered at a conference in 2006 in Waterloo, Canada, the volumecontains 39 chapters organized in three broad sections, ‘Identity’, ‘Migration’,and ‘Loss’ and providing a rich overview of how people are affected by the processof migration, either personally or historically. It is therefore no surprise that thisbook contains much more than ‘straightforward’ sociolinguistic perspectives butalso includes studies more at home in Film and Literary Studies, Anthropology,and Social History.

Sociolinguists have a natural interest in diasporas since they often provideexciting conditions for the empirical study of language-contact phenomena suchas major language change and even language loss. Furthermore, in diasporas wefind evidence for the use of particular languages as markers of personal and groupidentities and studying such diasporas allows us to investigate changes in speaker


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communities both in real-time and apparent-time. As sociolinguists we are moreused to speaking of linguistic enclaves or Sprachinseln (speech islands) than ofdiasporas when discussing Germans – in itself a highly problematic term whenapplied to people, ethnicity, and language, both historically and contemporarily– abroad, and there is now a significant body of recent research in Germansociolinguistics (e.g. Salmons 1993; Hogan-Brun 2000; Keel and Mattheier2003; Berend and Knipf-Komlosi 2006; Carl and Stevenson 2009) to elucidateour understanding of life in the German diaspora. Furthermore, a recent finehandbook of German communities in Eastern and Central Europe exists in theform of Eichinger, Plewnia and Riehl (2008). As early as the Middle Ages, Germancommunities migrated as settlers and moved to Eastern Europe. However, itwas mostly during the eighteenth century that German-speaking people movedboth eastwards to Romania and Hungary, as well as Russia, and westwards toPennsylvania in order to practise their religious faiths without fear of persecution.During the nineteenth century the majority of emigrants left Germany, mostlyfor 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 the1930s because of Nazi persecution and the impending war and during the 1940sand 1950s because of the aftermath of the war. After 1989 significant numbersof ethnic Germans moved ‘back’ to Germany from Eastern Europe and theSoviet Union, obtaining full German citizenship on the basis of their ethnicity,having left Germany a couple of centuries previously. In addition to theseeconomically or religiously motivated migrations we have emigration basedon life-style choices, e.g. movements to Australia and New Zealand since the1970s 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 anyparticular time period, location, or group of migrants from its coverage, andthe reader gets a comprehensive, though at times overwhelming, impressionof the diversity of German diasporas. The majority of papers deal with EasternEurope/Russia and North America – thus echoing scholarly emphases over thelast 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 thetwo chapters on Germans in Australia by Sandra Kipp and Doris Schupbachrespectively. More exotic locations include nineteenth-century Turkey (ChristinPschichholz), where some 3,000 Germans resided and a German-speakingchurch was established. However, these Germans integrated rather quickly intoTurkish society, which poses the problem in this chapter and others (e.g. GiselaHolfter’s discussion of the fate of four German-speaking refugees in the 1930sIreland or Anne Ribbert’s piece on syntactic borrowing of German students inthe Netherlands today) of when or whether the notion of diaspora becomestoo stretched: how many migrants do you need to create a distinct communityand how structured/distinct does this community need to be for scholars toidentify it as a diaspora? The title of the volume – diasporic experiences – suggeststhat it is justifiable and of merit to include papers which appear to satisfy our


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general understanding of diaspora more peripherally than others but the pricefor such a broad-church approach is that readers may be left overwhelmed bythe diversity of scenarios and intellectual angles rather than guided in theirunderstanding.

The contributions are grouped into three thematic sections mentioned in thevolume’s subtitle and each section is introduced with a more general discussionproviding a guiding framework for at least some of the papers following it. Thesection on Identity is introduced by an overview article by Janet Fuller and is alsocertainly the one covering topics most familiar or relevant to sociolinguists. Thetwo other sections also contain linguistic analyses but to a more limited extentand a number of chapters provide fairly straightforward accounts of ‘historicalfacts’ and analyses of emigration in film and literary studies. In the interest ofinterdisciplinarity, the inclusion of studies from a variety of fields is of course tobe welcomed, but this can also have a disorientating effect when the commonthread linking such papers is tangential. Here, however, the benefits outweigh thedisadvantages: Natasha G. Wiebe’s paper on the semi-autobiographical writingsof Di Brandt, an English professor of Mennonite Canadian origin, provides someinteresting reflections on what it means to be part of a diasporic communityand 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 inWest German films in the 1950s offers a useful reminder of problems facedby Germans ‘returning’ to the motherland, especially when set in contrast toCarsten Wurmann’s discussion of the figure of the rich ‘Uncle from America’ inGerman literature since the eighteenth century.

There is, thus, much to be said in favour of publishing such a wide range oftopics in one volume and, as with many conference proceedings, some chapterswill 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 chapterscontain little more than seven or eight pages of actual text (plus two to three forendnotes and bibliography). This would be short at the best of times but, especiallyin a volume which addresses such a wide range of scholarly disciplines, thebrevity of the individual chapters does not allow for much more than a generalintroduction to the author’s topic. A number of chapters report from studieswith a significant body of data, yet only have space for one or two quotations.This is particularly, though not exclusively, lamentable for papers presentingdiscourse analyses or oral histories. The reviewer understands that, at 528 pages,this book has perhaps reached its physical limits but with most contributionsappearing merely to scratch the surface of their topics, some readers willbe left unsatisfied with the depth of elucidation derived from reading thiswork.

Nonetheless, this book succeeds in demonstrating what an interdisciplinaryapproach to a topic can mean and readers will get a genuine impressionof how wide-ranging sociological topics such as diaspora are. In the vastmajority of papers, quotations and examples have been translated into English


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so that this book, which has been meticulously edited and presented, will beaccessible to readers without any knowledge of German. Whilst some individualchapters may be too brief to be truly insightful, they nonetheless serve as anexcellent starting point for further study and, thus, on the whole this bookcan be recommended as a comprehensive introduction to German DiasporicExperiences.

REFERENCES

Berend, Nina and Elisabeth Knipf-Komlosi (eds.). 2006. Sprachinselwelten: The Worldof 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. Tubingen,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 VarietiesWorldwide: 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 LanguagesUniversity of Bristol

Bristol, BS8 1TEU.K.

[email protected]

MARGARITA HIDALGO (ed.). Mexican Indigenous Languages at the Dawn ofthe 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 SANCHEZ

This volume is an excellent contribution to Language Policy studies in generaland to Reverse Language Shift studies (Fishman 1991, 2001) in particular. Thecontributions in the volume range from historical and theoretical approachesto the study of the maintenance of indigenous languages in Mexico to actualimplementations of bilingual and intercultural education programs that serveindigenous populations in Mexico. The publication of this volume is very timelybecause across Latin America there is a growing impulse among indigenous,non-profit and some government organizations to reclaim indigenous languages


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as part of the region’s cultural heritage (Sichra 2009) and as a means ofconstructing more inclusive national identities that accept multiculturalism asan integral part of modern democratic societies (Coronel-Molina and Grabner-Coronel 2005).

In a socio-economic context in which multicultural Latin American countrieswith indigenous populations are experiencing previously unforeseen andrelatively stable economic growth, albeit with high levels of inequality, theissue of how to reconcile these emerging economies with social realities thatare linguistically and culturally diverse becomes a pressing matter. This volumeenriches the current debate on how to achieve this goal by providing historicaland contemporary evidence of how language policies have affected and areaffecting the development and maintenance of indigenous languages in Mexico.In theoretical terms, several contributions in this volume are framed withinthe Reverse Language Shift model as a means to understand the stage at whichindigenous 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 situationof Mexican Indigenous Languages (MIL). After a well articulated introductionby Hidalgo, the second chapter by Parodi proposes a historical view of languageshift in Colonial New Spain that shows how the initial policies that allowed theemergence of an Indianized variety of the New World Spanish koine, as well asits coexistence with indigenous languages, spoken not only by the indigenouspopulations but also by indianized Spaniards, criollos and mestizos (among themintellectuals such as Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz), underwent a major reversal in thelate 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 favoredthe Colonial language over the indigenous ones, despite the fact that indigenouslanguages had been incorporated as part of the new identities formed in thecolonial territories. Hidalgo furthers this view in the next two chapters whereshe focuses on the initial stages of the recovery mission undertaken by religiousgrammarians and such people as Fray Bernardino de Sahagun whose incrediblebody of work has as its main goal the exhaustive documentation of languageand cultural practices as well as the education of indigenous peoples in their ownlanguages. Hidalgo sees the interruption of the work of such grammarians asthe beginning of an enduring process of language shift from Mexican indigenouslanguages to New World Spanish, a language that gained strength from policiesoriginated in the metropolis in the 1600s. This process is accelerated bydemographic changes and by an ever more-generalized bilingualism amongindigenous peoples that serves both as a means of achieving languagemaintenance and adaptation to the hegemonic culture. In this chapter we alsofind a very interesting view of resistance and confrontation movements (commonto different regions of Latin America) that begin in colonial times and find inMexico a contemporary expression in the neo-zapatista movement of Chiapas.


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Part II of the book is dedicated to contemporary language policy anddemographic trends. Pellicer, Cifuentes and Herrera’s chapter delineates theextent to which the General Law on Linguistic Rights of Indigenous Peoples(2003) provides a framework for a more inclusive society in crucial areassuch as education and mass media. Althoff’s chapter compares the centralizedapproach to legislation in favor of indigenous languages in Mexico to the localizedapproach to indigenous language rights that characterizes legislation in the U.S.An extremely rich chapter by Cifuentes and Moctezuma provides an overviewof census data from 1970 to 2000 for 27 indigenous languages using fourindicators of maintenance and shift:

• permanence of speakers of indigenous languages in their place of ancestralsettling;

• 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 termsof the absolute numbers of speakers of indigenous languages but also aninverse relationship between bilingualism and use of indigenous languages athome.

Finally, Part III of the book is dedicated to the analysis of bilingualism andbilingual education programs. Messing and Rockwell discuss the role of teachersin bilingual education programs as promoters of Mexicano (Nahuatl) in bilingualschools in Tlaxcala and as agents of changes in attitudes towards the language inthe community. This role is of special relevance in a context of advanced languageshift. In a very revealing chapter Pfeiler and Zamisova provide an overview oflanguage policies to support the Mayan language since 1940 and compare twobilingual education programs in the Yucatan Peninsula. Their findings show thata ‘language-in-culture apprenticeship’ undertaken by community instructorsholds the best prospects for language maintenance. Flores Farfan’s chapterpresents an innovative approach to generating culturally-appropriate materialsfor bilingual Nahuatl speakers. These materials incorporate the oral traditions ofNahuatl communities in innovative ways (amate pictographs, videos narratingtraditional stories, riddles). Pellicer’s contribution shows us the complexity oflanguage shift in a context of Mazahua-Spanish bilingualism (at different stagesin Fishman’s scale) that is further compounded by the superimposition of English.The last contribution in this volume by Hidalgo presents a historical view oflanguage policy in Mexico. Hidalgo distinguishes three periods: an initial periodthat indicates reversal of language shift (ca. 1524 – ca. 1580); a major trendof language shift (1580–2000) which she subdivided in three eras (Colony,Independence and Revolution); and what she considers a new era inspired bythe neo-Zapatista indigenous movement that begins in 2003 with the passingof the Law on Linguistic Rights of the Indigenous Peoples, a significant step inreversing language shift.


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This book provides us with a general overview of the language policies thathave shaped the history, the present and the future of Mexican IndigenousLanguages. Many aspects of the realities described and analyzed by thecontributors to this volume are shared by other indigenous languages in theAmericas that are in the process of undergoing language shift. In a historicalmoment in which the viability of indigenous languages is at stake, this volumeis a major contribution to the understanding of the past and the present as ameans of constructing a future characterized by the maintenance and furtherdevelopment of the linguistic heritage of the Americas.

REFERENCES

Coronel-Molina, Serafın and Lina Grabner-Coronel. 2005. Lenguas e identidades en losAndes: Perspectivas Ideologicas y Culturales. Quito, Ecuador: Abya-Yala.

Fishman, Joshua A. 1991. Reversing Language Shift. Clevedon, U.K.: MultilingualMatters.

Fishman, Joshua A. 2001. Can threatened languages be saved? Clevedon, U.K.:Multilingual Matters.

Sichra, Inge. 2009. Atlas sociolinguıstico de pueblos indıgenas en America Latina.Cochabamba, Bolivia: UNICEF and PROIB Andes.

LILIANA SANCHEZ

Department of Spanish and PortugueseRutgers, the State University of New Jersey

105 George StreetNew Brunswick, NJ 08901–1414

U.S.A.

[email protected]

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 ‘restorethe centre-stage position of the bilingual speaker as a creative communicator’(p. 6) in the study of language contact phenomena. Throughout this bookhe elaborates the theme that the locus of language contact is the individualspeaker who selects from a complex repertoire of linguistic structures ratherthan ‘languages.’ This selection process is guided by the competing motivationsof communicative efficiency and contextual appropriateness. The developmentof this theme provides for a fascinating work on language contact from theperspective of language acquisition processes. Yaron Matras is a Professor ofLinguistics in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University


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of Manchester; his areas of specialization include language areas and languagetypology. His expertise in the Romani language also affords him a uniqueperspective on various types of language contact phenomena from a synchronicas well as diachronic perspective.

In the first chapter Matras presents a useful literature review on the subjectand lays out the three central themes of his work. One of the main purposesis to focus on the role of bilingual speakers as ‘creative communicators’ whoemploy a number of linguistic resources. These speakers do not shut on andoff separate language systems, but rather draw from a complex repertoire ofelements. The second theme is the ability of speakers to creatively draw onthis repertoire to fit the communicative context. Third, some structures are lessprone to conscious control on the part of the speaker, resulting in a leveling ofthe repertoire; this simplification of the speaker’s repertoire results in the patternand form replication known as ‘borrowing’.

In the second chapter Matras exemplifies these processes as he presents a casestudy of a boy growing up with exposure to English, German, and Hebrew. Theauthor shows how the child gradually develops an awareness of the differentsettings in which each language is used. During this development the childhas two competing goals: to communicate as effectively as possible using all thelinguistics elements available and to make language choices that are appropriatefor 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 refersback to examples from this study.

In Chapter 3, ‘Societal multilingualism’, the author discusses the roles oflanguages in society as well as the types of policy that societies use to managelinguistic resources. This chapter still has an emphasis on the individual bilingualspeaker by starting with a discussion of how the bilingual child graduallymatches different social contexts and domains. Matras extends the discussionof bilingualism to a societal level and examines how multilingual societies assigncertain languages to certain domains and what kinds of language policies arefound in these settings.

Chapter 4 explores the process of acquiring two languages. Matras offers herea helpful review of first and second language acquisition, as well as a gooddiscussion of bilingual language processing. The author again de-emphasizesthe idea of ‘linguistic systems’ in the bilingual’s mind in favor of the developmentof a single linguistic repertoire that is sensitive to contextual factors. Matrasbest 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 bilingualspeakers reduce the need to activate the ‘selection and inhibition mechanism’ byconsolidating the structures in their linguistic repertoire.

Matras’ knowledge of Romani allows him to provide a wealth of fascinatingexamples for the topic of Chapter 5, ‘Crossing the boundaries: Code-switching in


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conversation’. One example that is illustrative of this discussion is an instanceof a Romani speaker using the German concessive connector obwohl ‘although’.Matras explains this as an instance where words with grammatical functions canbe part of ‘automated task schemas in the “pragmatically dominant” language’(p. 109). When speaking German the Romani speaker has a high motivationto select only words that will be understood by the German addressee, whilewhen speaking with other Romani who are also bilingual with German theself-monitoring of repertoire-selection is much more relaxed. As a result ofthese two different scenarios, German becomes the pragmatically dominantlanguage, i.e. discourse markers like ‘although’ may be used in both Germanand Romani contexts, whereas Romani words may be used in only Romanicontexts.

Chapter 6 is a general discussion of the phenomenon of borrowing, whileChapters 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 thatmotivate it. Matras also explores the idea of scales of borrowability: some words,generally with a grammatical function, are less inclined to borrowing thancontent words such as nouns. Romani again is illustrative in that it provides anunusual example of borrowing inflectional endings along with the nouns thatit borrowed from Greek. Chapter 8 focuses specifically on the borrowability ofdifferent grammatical words. Especially intriguing is Matras’ discussion of howdiscourse markers are at the top of the borrowability scale. These words areoutside of the conscious control of the speakers who use them; such forms ‘areoften not readily recognised or treated by speakers as genuine word-forms andare perceived as a kind of para-linguistic inventory of gesture-like devices thatare exempted from context-bound and inhibition constraints’ (p. 193). Discoursemarkers are, thus, the example par excellence of using language acquisitionprocesses to exemplify contact-induced language change.

Chapter 9 discusses pattern replication and shows how the borrowing ofform differs in important ways from the borrowing of structures. This chapterillustrates these processes on a large scale by describing several well-knownlinguistic areas where non-related languages have grown more alike throughcenturies of close contact. This examination of convergence provides yet anotherexample of how language processing on an individual level can lead to languagechange. While the borrowing of word forms can be consciously avoided (out ofloyalty to one’s language, for example), the replication of patterns is a process ofwhich speakers are much less aware.

Chapter 10 shows how both form and pattern replication are at work tocreate pidgins, creoles, and mixed languages. Matras offers a well-balancedoverview of the properties of such languages as well as theories on how theselanguages emerge. He rightly points out that the study of creoles, pidgins andmixed languages represents a challenge to the comparative method in historicallinguistics. As most of the world’s languages have no past written records we


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therefore have ‘no proof for past events that may have led to the scrambling ofrepertoires . . .’ (p. 307).

In his conclusion Matras reiterates his view on language contact by stating thatrepertoire components of a bilingual speaker cannot ‘be shut down wholesalefor the duration of the communicative event’ (p. 308). Language change is theresult of a complex mix of competing processing and communicative factors,and Language Contact deftly guides the reader through the explanations of thesefactors. Matras strikes a healthy balance between synchronic and diachronicperspectives while at the same time offering a wealth of details from a widevariety of languages. While his book is excellent in its own right, it is not quitethe comprehensive view of the topic that he presents in the beginning, and thesocietal level approach to language contact phenomena at times is neglected. Agood example of the opposite approach is Sarah Thomason’s Language Contact(2000). Out of that work’s ten chapters, two chapters are devoted to endangeredlanguages and language death, respectively. It seems that in the current work themost glaring consequence of language contact – language death – should havegreater emphasis. The role of language attitudes and ideologies also does notseem to receive enough attention, especially given the author’s own statementthat, ‘[s]ince borrowing is initiated by individuals, their motivation to borrowis a key toward understanding the process’ (p. 221). Overall there could bemore discussion of societal-wide consequences of language contact and moreexamination of language polices and language conflict. These weaknesses,however, do not detract from this book’s important contribution and the uniqueperspective it offers. Matras does indeed succeed in his stated goal of bringinga much-needed emphasis on the individual bilingual speaker back to languagecontact 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 LiteratureNortheastern State University

609 N. Grand Avenue TahlequahOK 7446

U.S.A.

[email protected]


Documents

Philippine English: Linguistic and Literary Perspectives edited by Ma. Lourdes S. Bautista and Kingsley Bolton