Reviewed by Martín Ocón-Gamarra, University of Georgia

This book is a collection of articles and studies primarily related to Meso-American languages in the territory of Mexico. All of them concern the work of the renowned Mexican linguist Dr. Yolanda Lastra, to whom the book pays homage. There are four sections. The introductory first section presents Lastra’s professional biography. The remaining three sections collect studies on indigenous languages, Spanish in contact with these languages, and sociolinguistics.

The first section presents the first article by Pedro Martín Butragueño, which describes Lastra’s academic background and professional development in linguistics: undergraduate studies in Mexico, graduate studies in the United States, and subsequent research on Bolivian Quechua.

The second section, on indigenous languages, includes ten articles and studies by different authors that treat native North American languages, such as Southern Uto-Aztecan (ca. 1,600,000 speakers), Otomi (ca. 250,000), Purepecha (ca. 100,000), and Hopi (ca. 5,000). Most of these studies of less widely-spread Meso-American languages describe some interesting linguistic phenomena, such as the native numbering systems affected by Spanish loanwords and structural alternations, the description of the phonological systems of southern Uto-Aztecan in view of language universals, and contact-related phenomena.

The third section is about either Spanish itself or Spanish in contact with native languages. Among the first group are articles on pragmatic and semantic issues, such as the use of the discourse marker dizque in Mexico to express that somebody else has previously stated a determined sentence, morphological issues like subject-verb agreement, and lexical and sociolinguistic issues like soccer terminology used by Mexican women.

Among the articles on Spanish in contact with other languages, two describe convergence between Spanish and Uto-Aztecan and Spanish and Mazahuan. Note that these selections assume greater familiarity with the languages depicted in this book than many non-Mexican linguists would be likely to possess. Basic information about the approximate number of current speakers for each of those languages and a map showing the regional distribution of them might have been helpful.

The last section includes sociolinguistic studies of, e.g. the Spanish-Guarani bilingual situation in Paraguay, historical descriptions of the first contacts between Spanish and native American languages, the multilingual situation of Mexico, and an article by Una Canger entitled ‘Learning a second language first revisitado’, which describes the unique bilingual case of a community in Coatepec, Mexico, where children only speak Spanish until they reach adulthood and later become bilingual in Spanish and Nawa, their native tongue.