Reviewed by Caroline Gagné, Université Laval

This book pays tribute to Gillian Sankoff’s contribution to the studies of multilingual speech communities. In the introduction, Miriam Meyerhoff and Naomi Nagy discuss the bias of sociolinguistics—namely that the studies of the last forty years are mainly about monolingual communities, even though most speech communities in the world are multilingual. The papers are divided into three parts that illustrate Sankoff’s influence on sociolinguistics.

Part 1 focuses on language ideology. By analyzing links between linguistic variables of migrant workers and localized groups of French speakers, Michelle Daveluy suggests that Francophone Canada can be described as a set of multilingual speech communities. Christine Jourdan shows that the phases of the urbanization of Honiara, Solomon Islands, and the changes in the lifestyle of its inhabitants affect their language repertoires, which are formed of Pijin, English, and sixty-four vernacular languages. Felicity Meakins argues that maintaining Gurindji’s structure in Gurindji Kriol, a mixed language spoken in Australia, echoes the land rights movement and that both the land rights movement and the language reflect the preservation of a Gurindji identity. Rajend Mesthrie suggests South-African varieties such as Tsotsitaal, Flaaitaal, Iscamtho, and Gamtaal should be considered to be a single phenomenon, mainly because of their lexical order, in that they come from the syntax of already existing languages. Bambi B. Schieffelin studies the translation of parables from the Bible into Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinea) and their impact on the understanding of the genre in a language contact situation.

In Part 2, ‘Bridging macro- and micro-sociolinguistics’, Ruth King argues that Chiac, a variety of Acadian French spoken in New Brunswick, differs considerably from other Acadian varieties in the effects of language contact. She emphasizes that the importance of English influence on Chiac is not always reflected in the gathered linguistic data. David Sankoff applies his demolinguistic model that predicts the evolution of a bilingual community to the case of Tok Pisin and English in Papua New Guinea. Pierrette Thibault focuses on the use of French in Stanstead, a bilingual community in Quebec, and uses a comparative method to study phonological and morphological variables. She also explores local identity by studying bilingualism and code-switching and the influence of English phonology on native French.

Part 3 is about quantitative sociolinguistics. Julie Auger and Anne-JoséVilleneuve discuss the use of ne deletion and draw attention to the fact that Picard and French are distinct languages even though they are closely-related. Hélène Blondeau presents a historical study of the French pronoun paradigm mainly within Montreal’s French-speaking community where English and French are in contact. Hélène Blondeau and Naomi Nagy focus on second language acquisition—specifically, how frequency affects the analysis of subordinate clauses, complementizers, and verbs of quotation in Montreal Anglophone French and English. William Labov discusses the substrate effects on Pennsylvania English, Puerto Rican Spanish, and Italian-American English. Finally, Miriam Meyerhoff suggests that an evaluation of the simplicity or complexity of creole languages must include probabilistic features. She then illustrates that there is linguistic structure encoded stochastically in those languages by studying Bislama (Vanuatu) and Tayo (New Caledonia).