Reviewed by Kanavillil Rajagopalan, State University at Campinas, Brazil

There is much more than straightforward lexical borrowing taking place in languages across the world as a result of ongoing interlingual and intercultural contact. One also witnesses ‘tendencies in construction of texts inspired by a process of creating a larger communicative sphere than is one language and culture’ (v). Curiously though, writes Krčmová, integration and disintegration are but two sides of the same coin. Even with clear tendencies to homogenization, one should not ignore the equally clear signs of a yearning for self-affirmation.

However, the title promises a good deal more than the book actually delivers. Most of the articles deal with the linguistic reality of Europe, with a heavy emphasis on Eastern Europe. The aim of ‘integrating the world’ is too grand for a book that passes over in silence the continents of Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas. This may be due to the fact that the present volume is an updated version of a Czech volume published in Prague shortly before. The editor notes that for the revised edition ‘other co-authors [were invited], not only from the Czech Republic, but from Slovakia, Germany, England, Italy and Spain’ (vi).

The articles that make up this volume appear in two sections of unequal sizes. The first, ‘Languages and their fates’, consists of six articles, the second, ‘Integration in language and communication’, twice that. The articles in the first section present some interesting case studies, like that of integration and disintegration in a Brno sociolect, the problems faced by minority languages such as Sorbs/Wends in Germany, and the Friulian language in Italy, as well as challenges to identity encountered by Bulgarian Pomaks and Galician speakers in Spain.

The articles of the second section predominantly take a broad-brush view of such topics as intralanguage and interlanguage integration, integration from the perspective of areal linguistics, stylistic analysis of film reviews, aspects of integration in languages and linguistic concepts, matchmaking advertisements and societal values, and the history of language contact over the past millennium. But there are also a few articles that take an in-depth look at e.g. discourse markers in Czech and English, differences in tobacco product health warnings between the two languages, and contacts between Slavic and Arab cultures.

On the whole, the articles are of a high standard and contain impressive insights, which in a sense makes up for the exaggerated claim in the title of the volume. There are important lessons to be learned from each of the case studies as well as the broad brush overviews, which, as the readers will verify for themselves, have significant similarities to linguistic realities elsewhere in the world.