Book Review

[Harold F. Schiffman]

Forwarded from LINGUIST List 16.24
Mon Jan 10 2005



 The Language, Ethnicity and Race Reader
 Routledge (Taylor & Francis)
 2003
 Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-1131.html


 Reviewed by Laura Callahan, The City College of New York

 OVERVIEW

 This volume contains twenty-five papers first published between 1921 and
2003; the majority were written within the last twenty years. All treat
some aspect of the relationship between language and ethnicity and/or
race, some from opposing positions. The book is divided into three
sections, each with its own introduction. In addition, there is an
introduction to the collection as a whole, which includes tables situating
the papers according to stance as well as geographic and institutional
focus. Original notes and references are placed at the end of each paper;
cross references between the papers appear in footnotes.  There are author
and subject indices for the entire collection. The editors have shortened
some of the articles and added footnotes with explanations of terminology;
in some cases sentences from the original text have been reworded. More
specialized readers are directed to the articles' primary sources.

 SYNOPSIS

 Section One: Colonialism, Imperialism and Global Process

 1. Otto Jespersen (1922) The origin of speech.  Jespersen presents
 primitive vs. evolved forms of language as offering a series of
 oppositions between song and speech, the concrete vs. the abstract and
 pure emotion vs. rational thought.

 2. Edward Sapir (1921) Language, race and culture.  Sapir outlines a
 rejection of causal connections between race, culture and language, at
the
 same time tackling the difficult task of defining what is covered under
 the first two terms.

 3. Bill Ashcroft (2001) Language and race.  Ashcroft traces the links
made
 over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries between language and race,
 especially in philological theory. He examines the use of language to
 locate race in color terms.

 4. Mervyn Alleyne (1989) Language in Jamaican culture.  Alleyne discusses
 the origins of current language varieties in Jamaica from an African
 substrate stance, with particular attention to the sociolinguistic
factors
 in their formation.

 5. Ngugi wa Thiong'o (1986) The language of African literature.  Thiong'o
 makes a case for African literature to be written in African languages,
 arguing that language is a carrier of culture. He points out that the use
 of European languages automatically excludes the majority of the
 population from many spheres of influence.

 6. Alumin Mazrui (1997) The World Bank, the language question and the
 future of African education.  Mazrui discusses the World Bank's
 conflicting statements and practices affecting indigenous language
 education. He concludes that World Bank and IMF policies are designed to
 perpetuate former colonial powers' economic dominance in Africa.

 7. Randolph Quirk (1990) Language varieties and standard language.  Quirk
 notes ESL teaching situations worldwide in which Standard English has
lost
 its supreme status. He argues against this trend on the grounds that
 Standard as opposed to other varieties of English is indispensable for
 social and economic advancement.

 8. Ben Rampton (1990) Displacing the 'native speaker': expertise,
 affiliation and inheritance.  Rampton discusses the difficulties of
 defining native speakerhood, and proposes a set of criteria with
 distinctions between competence and sociolinguistic identities.

 Section Two: Nation-states and Minorities

 9. Joshua Fishman (1972) The impact of nationalism on language planning.
 Fishman pinpoints modernization, authentification and uniformation as
 conflicting forces in language planning in the service of nationalism,
 using Turkey and France as examples.

 10. Michael Billig (1995) Banal nationalism.  Billig examines signs of
 routine, banal nationalism and flagged nationalism. The latter type
 surfaces on national holidays and in response to extraordinary events. He
 discusses nationalism vs. patriotism; the first is associated with
 national agression and the second with national self-love.

 11. Ray Honeyford (1988) The language issue in multi-ethnic English
 schools.  Honeyford questions whether all dialects of English are
suitable
 for complex tasks, and whether a failure to acquire Standard English is
 responsible for West Indian and other ethnic minority children's low
 achievement scores in British schools.

 12. John Rickford (1997) Suite for ebony and phonics. Rickford presents a
 brief exposition, accessible to non-linguists, of the features and
 possible origins of African American Vernacular English, and clarifies
the
 1997 Oakland, California school board decision regarding the use of
 contrastive analysis between AAVE and Standard American English.

 13.  Wendy Bokhorst-Heng. Singapore's Speak Mandarin campaign: Language
 ideological debates and the imagining of the nation.  Bokhorst-Heng
 examines governmental efforts to shape national identity through language
 prescription. Mandarin is promoted over other Chinese dialects, to foster
 unity and to preserve culture, and to prevent English from becoming the
 only lingua franca among the Chinese community in Singapore.

 14. Roger Hewitt (1992) Language, youth and the destabilisation of
 ethnicity.  Hewitt discusses young people's language uses that are driven
 by desires to announce both internal and external cultural identities--
 identities that do not always coincide with the user's ethnicity.

 15. Jane H. Hill (1995) Mock Spanish, covert racism and the (leaky)
boundary
 between public and private spheres. Hill demonstrates how the use of
 Spanish loan words or English words inflected with Spanish affixes are
 used to make racist references to Hispanics under the cover of humor.

 16. Jacqueline Urla (1995) Outlaw language: Creating alternative public
 spheres in Basque free radio.  Urla reports on the free radio movement in
 the Basque Country, in which young Basques air locally relevant programs.
 The tension between Basque and Castilian gives rise to the practice Hill
 (essay 15) describes, except in this case it is the minority language
 speakers who parody the dominant language speakers.

 17. Monica Heller  (1999) Alternative ideologies and la Francophonie.
Using the
 case of a French-language minority high school in Ontario, Heller
examines who has
 the power to decide and define the legitimate language of international
 communication and which local languages are valued as commodities.

 Section Three: Language, Discourse and Ethnic Style

 18. Benjamin Lee Whorf (c. 1936) An American Indian model of the
 universe.  Whorf translates the Hopi conceptualization of what in
European
 languages is known as time and space into terms of what is manifest and
 objective vs. unmanifest and subjective.

 19. Susan U. Philips (1972) Participant structures and communicative
 competence: Warm Springs children in community and classroom.  Philips
 highlights differences between Native American and non-Indian
communities'
 rules for verbal interaction, for the demonstration of achievement and
for
 the way individuals are accorded authority, and discusses ways to keep
 such differences from negatively affecting Indian children's  progress in
 school.

 20. John Gumperz (1979) Cross-cultural communication.  In an interview
 during the filming of Crosstalk, a cross-cultural communication training
 film, Gumperz explains the need for awareness of differences in the use
of
 tone of voice, directness and politeness formulas by British, Asian and
 West Indians using English.

 21. R. P. McDermott and Kenneth Gospodinoff (1979) Social contexts for
 ethnic borders and school failure.  McDermott and Gospodinoff argue that
 differences in communicative styles are not the cause of school failure,
 but rather that these differences are emphasized by children as a
reaction
 to organizational problems. They offer an analysis of one incident in a
 New York City classroom  to illustrate their thesis.

 22. John Gumperz and Eduardo Hernandez-Chavez (1972) Bilingual code-
 switching.  Gumperz and Hernandez-Chavez maintain that the use of more
 than one language or dialect within a conversation or conversational turn
 communicates meaning that is dependent on a complex set of social
factors.

 23. John Taggart Clark (2003) Abstract inquiry and the patrolling of
 Black/White borders through linguistic stylization.  Clark describes
 African American high school students' marking, via satirical imitation,
 of their African American teacher's pronunciation and rhetorical style as
 being a white and outgroup style.

 24. Cecilia Cutler (1999) Yorkville crossing: White teens, hip hop and
 African American English.  Cutler presents a longitudinal study of a
white
 teenager who uses features of AAVE pronunciation and hip hop vocabulary.

 25. Les Back (1995) X amount of sat siri akal!: Apache Indian, reggae
 music and intermezzo culture.  Back postulates the formation of a culture
 in which boundaries are transcended, represented by a  fusion of South
 Asian and African Caribbean linguistic elements in music.

 EVALUATION

 The Language, Ethnicity and Race Reader is a highly versatile resource
 that will be useful to scholars in education, sociolinguistics, the
 sociology of language and ethnic studies. The presentation in one source
 of this many essays, including earlier works for a diachronic perspective
 and contrasting viewpoints, is especially appreciated.

 In the general introduction, Harris and Rampton give the rationale for
 their ordering of the papers, which are divided into three
 sections, "moving from phenomena and processes that are longer and larger
 down into ones that are smaller and briefer" (p. 2). This arrangement is
 successful, as the reader does indeed come away with a sense of having
 gone from the macro to the micro. Some of the major themes treated are, in
 Section One, "the links between language, race, culture and development"
 (p. 15); in Section Two, language and national identity and language and
 the creation of nations; and in Section Three, racial, cultural and ethnic
 authenticity; the maintenance of group boundaries and the appropriation of
 speech forms developed by and/or associated with another group.

 The editorial modifications mentioned in the Overview section of this
 review are meant to make the book accessible to a wider audience. The
 footnotes explaining linguistic terms will be particularly welcome in
 interdisciplinary courses. However, a proliferation of the brackets used
 to indicate where there has been abbreviation and re-wording is a
 distraction in some of the papers that makes for uneven reading. This is a
 small criticism however, and the inclusion of so wide a range of articles,
 which might not have been possible otherwise, more than compensates for
 any inconvenience.

 The book's title points to an important issue: though race and ethnicity
 are often treated as synonymous, from the perspective of the individuals
 in question they may be quite separate. Language introduces another factor
 to the equation, especially when an incongruence arises between the
 languages spoken or not spoken by a person and his or her ethnicity or
 race.

 ABOUT THE REVIEWER

 Laura Callahan is Assistant Professor of Spanish Linguistics at the City
 College, City University of New York (CUNY), and Research Fellow at the
 Research Institute for the Study of Language in an Urban Society at the
 Graduate Center, CUNY. Her current work focuses on language choice in
 interethnic communication.