This article provides an empirically grounded account of what happens when more persons than one talk at once in conversation. It undertakes to specify when such occurrences are problematic for the participants, and for the organization of interaction; what the features of such overlapping talk are; and what constraints an account of overlapping talk should meet. It describes the practices employed by participants to deal with such simultaneous talk, and how they form an organization of practices which is related to the turn-taking organization previously described by Sacks et al. 1974. This “overlap resolution device” constitutes a previously unexplicated component of that turn-taking organization, and one that provides solutions to underspecified features of the previous account.

Koineization – the development of a new, mixed variety following dialect contact – has well-documented outcomes. However, there have been few studies of the phenomenon actually in progress. This article describes the development of a new variety in the English New Town of Milton Keynes, designated in 1967. The article is structured around eight “principles” that relate the process of koineization to its outcomes. Recordings were made of 48 Milton Keynes-born children in three age groups (4, 8, and 12), the principal caregiver of each child, and several elderly locally born residents. Quantitative analysis of ten phonetic variables suggests that substantial but not complete focusing occurs in the child generation. The lack of linguistic continuity in the New Town is demonstrated, and the time scale of koineization there is discussed. Finally, it is shown that demography and the social-network characteristics of individuals are crucial to the outcomes of koineization.

In this “idiosyncratic personal essay,” Haiman applies his formidable erudition and powers of social observation to questions that North American linguists in general are, unfortunately, content to ignore: the evolutionary origins and historical development of metalanguage, i.e. the property of language that allows us to say “that which is not,” including something other than what we “really” mean. The interdisciplinary nature of this project – engaging evolutionary biology, anthropology, and psychology, in addition to virtually all the traditional subfields of formal/theoretical linguistics – makes it an especially pioneering work, and represents a theoretical overture which, I hope, other linguists and social scientists of all stripes will follow up.

In the mid-1960s, the late sociologist Harvey Sacks initially developed the concept of “membership categorization devices” as a means of analyzing how people identify, describe, and refer to one another. In his now canonical treatment of a child's story, “The baby cried. The mommy picked it up,” Sacks (1972) explored the possibilities for formal analyses of references to and descriptions of persons, as implemented in written texts and talk-in-interaction.

The past decade has seen a healthy increase in the number of studies in the areas constituting language contact research. Prominent among these have been investigations into grammatical aspects of “code-switching,” often covering pairs of languages not previously investigated. Many of the chapters in the book under review are based on papers read at a conference in Bielefeld, Germany, in 1994. While this gives the papers coherence, it means that some of the points made have already been left behind in later publications by the same and other authors.

This is a collection of 21 essays from the 20th International L.A.U.D. (Linguistic Agency University of Duisburg) Symposium, held from Feb. 28 to March 3, 1995, at the University of Duisburg, Germany. In the words of the editor of the collection, the authors “explore the relations between social, psychological and (socio)linguistic aspects of language contact and language conflict situations both from a theoretical and an applied linguistics perspective” (x). The volume is divided into four sections: “Sociolinguistic and linguistic issues,” “Language policy and language planning,” “Language use and attitudes towards language(s),” and “Code-switching: One speaker, two languages.” Rather than discuss all 21 articles, I will focus on several whose themes are relevant to a number of areas of sociolinguistics.

In his preface, Knowles makes clear what his book is not. It is not a history of literary English, and it is not an account of changes in linguistic form; it is a “cultural history.” In the introductory chapter, he declares: “In view of the close connection between language and power, it is impossible to treat the history of the language without reference to politics” (9). Of course, books that purport to be histories of English have often “treated” the subject without apparent politics. Knowles is right in alleging that the politics of such books has often been implicit, since most of them provide information about the ascent of one variety of the language to the elevated status of a standard – as if that were an inevitable and desirable result of the spirit of goodness working itself out through speech.

Among the most relevant, practical issues in the courtroom – and explicitly recognized by attorneys well in advance of their occurrence – are the potential dilemmas involved in the questioning of witnesses. Practicing attorneys (and often their trial consultants) spend much time considering strategies for managing these. If we do X, this will happen; if we do Y, that will happen. Komter's book is a fine-grained and multiplex analysis of the interactional dilemmas that confront courtroom participants in cases of violent crime in the Netherlands. Using a conversation-analytic/ethnomethodological framework, she examines the communicative dilemmas that arise in a system with both adversarial and inquisitorial elements, and she shows how these dilemmas are shaped by the institutional interests of the participants. In a much broader sense, her study continues a strong empirical program initiated by Atkinson & Drew 1979 on the attribution and negotiation of blame in accusation sequences; but other readers may find Komter's work strikingly reminiscent of Pomerantz's classic analysis (1978) of the interactional dilemmas that shape compliment responses.

In the introduction to this book, the reader follows Wilson Nyanforth, a 35-year-old Kru civil servant, through his morning in New Krutown, Monrovia, Liberia. As Nyanforth travels to work, he uses Kru and English separately and in combination, his language choices varying with the setting and the participants in the encounter. His greeting to his boss is an example: “Good morning Honorable Tarpeh, na kl[backwards c]ba (my chief)!” Breitborde's monograph on language choices of Kru-speaking inhabitants of New Krutown has many such specific case studies of language in use: these illustrate his claims and make the book accessible to readers. But his goal is to do more than provide descriptive case studies. He writes: “I ask how the choices urban Kru persons make to speak English embody certain aspects of contemporary social relations and cultural values, not simply within the community of speakers but also linking them to the Liberian national polity. In this sense, then, I attempt to integrate both the (societal) macrolevel and the (individual) microlevel in the exploration of the social meaning of English”.

This is a very contemporary book. By anchoring his discussion on English Language Teaching (ELT) in Hong Kong at the widely watched pivotal point of transition from British to Chinese sovereignty, Pennycook is able to range backward to ELT in India, and to construct a narrative of the adherence between the discourse of colonialism and the discourse(s) of ELT. Worldwide, ELT is a major industry. It collects practitioners who range in background from specialists in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, with Ph.D.s and research grants, to those who have few or no credentials beyond having been born into an English-speaking community and enjoying world travel. This book should find a significant and large audience among these teachers; but somehow one wonders if it will.

In what she terms “an exercise in historical eavesdropping”, Kamensky explores the relationship between speech and society in 17th-century New England. In doing so, she places speech at center stage in the New England experience. Her insightful study floodlights the connections between gender and speech, speech and power, community cohesiveness and community deviance. Early New Englanders, she argues, believed “speech was conduct and conduct was speech” that is, in a culture that remained largely oral, they imbued speech with powers almost as great as those of actual deeds.

The purpose of this volume is not only to provide “more delicate and accurate descriptions” (p. 2) of Louisiana French, but also to highlight the variation, origins, and social contexts of French-related varieties in Louisiana. The volume's editor, whose research on French and creole linguistics spans decades (cf. Valdman 1977, 1978, 1983, 1993) has gathered – starting from workshops and annual meetings on regional dialects – an impressive collection of articles on Western Hemisphere French, in order to create a comprehensive overview of the past, present, and future of French in Louisiana. The reader may consider dividing the book into four sections: (a) general issues surrounding endangered languages and minority languages in the US; (b) linguistic sketches of Cajun French (CF) and Louisiana Creole (LC); (c) discussions of sociopolitical events surrounding the language planning and preservation movements; and (d) chapters devoted to other varieties of French that have similarities to CF and LC.

South Philadelphia can be added to the littered landscape of Jewish geography, in which Chelm, Belz, Odessa, Boiberik, and Brownsville are terrain abandoned by Jews. They are romanticized in folk songs, but they make poor real estate investments. Similarly, Yiddish cultural life may be seen as a landscape of outmoded lifeways. The Yiddish language and its dialects have been cast off, but at the same time they remain cherished in memory. Peltz's ethnography explores Yiddish as it survives among what is left of a Yiddish-speaking community in Philadelphia. The story of Yiddish is one of powerlessness; Peltz takes us to the seemingly marginal Jews, the yidelekh – working-class, elderly women and men who are marginalized as a function of their old age, their accents, and their lack of higher education.

For more than a decade, Americanists have been working in the shadow of Greenberg's Language in the Americas (1987) and the hemisphere-wide classification of American Indian languages proposed there. Greenberg's work, based for the most part on naïve comparisons of lexical data with which he was largely unfamiliar, was met with considerable skepticism by scholars familiar with the problems of American linguistic classification. But Greenberg, a senior linguist who is widely recognized as the father of modern linguistic typology, aggressively defended his methods and results, and he made allies among geneticists and archeologists who found that his tripartite classification (Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene, and “Amerind”) dovetailed with some of their own ideas. Moreover, his book was published by a leading university press. Mainly for these reasons – certainly not for its critical acceptance – Language in the Americas has become a standard reference work. It is in most academic libraries in North America, and in many it is given a place of honor on the reference shelf – together with Merritt Ruhlen's Guide to the world's languages, I: Classification (published by the same press, 1987), which, at least for the Americas, does little more than uncritically recapitulate Greenberg.

Change of editorship. The present volume of Language in Society (vol. 29, 2000) marks a transition in the editorship of the journal; the newly appointed editor is Jane H. Hill.

From the beginning of 2000, then, all manuscripts submitted for publication, all books offered for review, and all new editorial correspondence should be sent to Prof. Jane H. Hill, Editor, Language in Society, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721.