Reviewed by Taras Shmiher, Ivan Franko National University

This book is an outgrowth of the 5th International Conference on Translation, ‘Interculturality and translation: Less translated languages’, organized by the Departament de Traducció i d’Interpretació at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain) in October 2001.

The concept of ‘less translated languages’ developed in this collection is inspired by the concept of ‘lesser-used languages’ (a term now current in the EU). ‘Less translated’ refers to those languages that are less often the source of translation in the international exchange of linguistic goods, and not to the number of people using these languages. This category serves equally well for widely used languages such as Arabic or Chinese and long-neglected minority languages such as Catalan. Albert Branchadell (1‑23) discusses the key terms ‘cultural turn’, ‘power turn’, and ‘nation-building’, which the collection uses to establish its theoretical background.

Part 1 considers the hegemonic position of English in cross-cultural communication. By using statistics and some mathematical operations, Anthony Pym and Grzegorz Chrupała (27–38) prove translation alone is neither a sufficient measure of nor a satisfactory remedy for the effects of globalization on cultural diversity. Some financial, political, social, and linguistic problems of European multilingualism are discussed by Vilelmini Sosonis (39–47). Since Arabic imports many terms from English and French, Hassan Hamzé (49–66) considers the possibilities for adopting systematic Arabic equivalents of Greco-Latin prefixes and suffixes. Nobel Perdu Honeyman (67–74) investigates indirect—from Arabic through English into Spanish—translation to determine the effect of such indirect translation on a religious treatise by Bahá’ulláh. Maria D. Oltra Ripoll (75–91) analyzes possible techniques for translating Anglo-Saxon cultural references in films.

In Part 2, minority languages are viewed through the prism of translation inequality. Oscar Diaz Fouces (95–104) outlines three criteria of translation policies (homogeneity, autonomy, and prestige) that might improve linguistic mediation. Marta García Gonzáles (105–23) has designed a model that allows us to describe Western minority languages using a common methodological framework. Albert Branchadell (125–35) presents the concept of a ‘mandatory translation language’ and examines the extent to which the Catalans can live through their own language without having to use another. The paper by Eva Espasa (137–45) reviews interculturalism in stage translation over the last twenty years, finding translation to be either enrichment or appropriation. Using a neurobiological approach in their view of ‘obscured cultures’ of Sub-Saharan Africa, Anna Aguilar-Amat and Jean-Bosco Botsho (147–61) reflect on the cognitive processes of adaptable individuals and translators.

Part 3 presents specific cases of translating from less translated cultures and languages. The case analyses help to develop important theoretical conclusions about the influence of postcolonial literature research on translation theory (Goretti López Heredia, 165–76), the translator’s invisibility (Andrés Xosé Salter Iglesias, 177–87), intercultural aesthetic translatability (Dora Sales Salvador, 189–205), sociocultural functions of Buddhist translation (Nicole Martínez Melis, 207–24), and the translators’ role in beyond-linguistic mediation (Leticia Herrero, 225–35). Sara Rovira-Esteva (237–54) presents specifics about the attributes of Chinese measure words and how they might be applied in teaching and translation.

Part 4 is given over to considering the project of translating into a specific less translated language—Catalan. Montserrat Bacardí (257–68) gives a brief survey of translation from Spanish into Catalan in the twentieth century, and the present state of work in the field is described by Cristina García de Toro (269–87). Irene Llop Jordana (289–311) uses a twentieth-century bibliography to survey works translated from Hebrew into Catalan.

The final section of the book is a symposium on six significant Catalan translators: Andreu Nin, Bonaventura Vallespinosa, Manuel de Pedrolo, Josep Vallverdú, Maria-Mercè Marçal, and Jordi Arbonès i Montull, all of whom played an influential role in the process of linguistic ‘normalization’.

Reviewed by Laura Felton Rosulek, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Discourse and silencing is one of the very few collections of studies in the field of discourse analysis to use ‘silencing’, defined as ‘a way of using language to limit, remove or undermine the legitimacy of another use of language’ (2), as a theoretical term. The book is organized into three major themes: ‘Gender and the discourses of privacy’, ‘Law and institutional discourses’, and ‘National politics and the discourses of exclusion’. Thiesmeyer’s stated objective for the book is not only to discuss the theoretical notions and real-world examples of silencing, but also to demonstrate the commonalities within discourse-analysis studies on silencing despite the interdisciplinary nature of the field.

In Part 1 on gender has two chapters. Alison Towns, Peter Adams, and Nicola Gavey, in ‘Silencing talk of men’s violence towards women’, examine interviews of men who have abused their partners to see how they self-silence the discussion of their own violence and convince others to remain silent about it as well. In ‘Conversational styles and ellipsis in Japanese couples’ conversations’, Shoko Okazaki Yohena analyzes ellipses in the talk of Japanese couples for variations in use and interpretation. She finds that they can be used as a tool for remaining silent about a topic, and that filling in a partner’s ellipses with an unintended meaning can silence the speaker’s message.

Part 2 begins with Valérie Fridland’s ‘Quiet in the court: Attorneys’ silencing strategies during courtroom cross-examination’. She shows that during the cross-examination of an alleged sexual assault victim, the defense lawyer uses linguistic strategies to silence the witness’s own narration of the events. Patricia E. O’Connor, in ‘Telling bits: Silencing and the narratives behind prison walls’, discusses how the discourses of and about people in prison are silenced in our society, and how prisoners often self-silence their own experiences of violence within prisons. She then shows that by encouraging autobiographical discourse from inmates, one can break this silence in a potentially therapeutic way.

In Part 3, ‘National politics and the discourses of exclusion’, Ruth Wodak (‘Discourse of silence: Anti-Semitic discourse in post-war Austria’) shows that while the existence of antisemitism in Austria is denied or ignored, antisemitism does exist in the public discourse, though often in more covert linguistic forms. ‘Silencing by law: The 1981 Polish “Performances and Publications Control Act”’, by Dariusz Galasiński, discusses how a law in Poland legalized the silencing of topics in public discourse that were contrary to those in power and how the text of the law itself remained silent about its taking away the people’s freedom of speech. Finally, Sandra Lambertus, in ‘News discourse of Aboriginal resistance in Canada’, finds that, when comparing two newspaper articles on the same event, one silenced the discourse of a dominated group in favor of the discourse of a group in power, but the other included both.

The concluding article by Adam Jaworski, ‘Political silencing: A view from Laurie Anderson’s performance art’, shows how a performance artist mentions in her work some of the themes about silence that the previous authors discussed.

This book examines silencing in a wide range of contexts and from many different perspectives. It is an important resource for scholars interested in how social actors are kept from participating in discourses and how certain topics are kept hidden from public discourses. This book should serve well the field of sociolinguistics, and is a particularly important addition to theoretical studies in discourse analysis.

Reviewed by Malcolm Ross, The Australian National University

The topic of the eleven papers in this volume is nicely defined in the opening words of Henning Andersen’s introduction: ‘Linguistic stratigraphy is the systematic investigation of the layering of grammatical and lexical material in a language or dialect which reflects its historical development and past contacts between its speakers and bearers of other linguistic and cultural traditions’. The papers were originally presented at a one-day workshop at the fifteenth International Conference on Historical Linguistics in Melbourne in August 2001.

The book is organized into seven geographically based sections: ‘Indo-European’ has three papers, ‘Africa’ two, and ‘Southeast Asia’, ‘Australia’, ‘Oceania’, ‘Japan’, and ‘Meso-America’ have a paper apiece. This welcome geographic coverage is rare among thematic volumes on historical linguistics.

Bernard Mees’s ‘Stratum and shadow: A genealogy of stratigraphy theories from the Indo-European West’ is a critical survey of the stratigraphy and stratum theories of west European linguists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and of their applications to western Indo-European languages. In ‘Slavic and the Indo-European migrations’ Henning Andersen offers a beautifully documented stratigraphy of loans in Slavic from nearby Indo-European varieties and among early Slavic dialects. Bridget Drinka’s chapter, ‘The development of the perfect in Indo-European: Stratigraphic evidence of prehistoric areal evidence’, begins with the striking statement that ‘morphological change … is, by its very nature, stratum-building’ (77) and shows how a division of early Indo-European history into periods and regions that she proposes elsewhere is further supported by an internal reconstruction of the development of the perfect aspect.

The African section is introduced by Christopher Ehret and contains two short but well-documented lexical stratigraphies, ‘Stratigraphy and prehistory: Bantu Zone F’ by B. F. Y. P. Masele and Derek Nurse, and ‘Language contacts in Nilo-Saharan prehistory’ by Christopher Ehret. The first concerns a group of languages located in western Tanzania. The authors show how the conventional divergence (family tree) approach requires a complementary convergence approach if the history of these and other Bantu languages is to be properly understood. The second reconstructs the history, reaching back five or so millennia, of the Rub group of languages.

In ‘Evidence for Austroasiatic strata in Thai’ Anthony Diller surveys the history of Thai contact with speakers of Old Mon and Old Khmer and describes the complexity of the resulting stratigraphy.

‘Millers and mullers: The archaeo-linguistic stratigraphy of technological change in holcene Australia’, by Patrick McConvell and Michael Smith, describes the borrowing of lexical items associated with the archaeologically attested rise and spread of seed-grinding in central Australia.

Hans Schmidt provides a useful summary of the literature on ‘Loanword strata in Rotuman’, a central Pacific Austronesian language whose lexical stratigraphy has received considerable attention because of massive borrowings from languages belonging to two Polynesian groups.

In ‘Substratum and adstratum in prehistoric Japan’ J. Marshall Unger summarizes the hypothesis that the lexical distance between Japanese and Korean (much greater than the time depth of their separation would lead one to expect) is explained by the number and extent of the strata of lexical borrowings in Japanese, both from Chinese and from earlier sources.

Whether Uto-Aztecan speakers spread from north to south or vice versa remains controversial, but Karin Dakin’s ‘Uto-Aztecan in the linguistic stratigraphy of Mesoamerican prehistory’ reports on research indicating an early presence of Uto-Aztecan speakers in Mesoamerica and thus calling the north–south hypothesis in its usual form into question.

All in all, this volume provides some excellent and detailed examples of lexical stratigraphy based on carefully worked-out phonological histories, and provides a surprising insight into just how far-reaching historical inferences based on stratigraphy can be.

Reviewed by Nina Rojina, University of Geneva

It is well known that English phrasal verbs have always been one of the most difficult parts of English grammar in foreign language learning. Therefore it is not surprising that even advanced learners understand them poorly and tend to use them rarely. This book aims to provide necessary information (from both a syntactic and a semantic point of view) about phrasal verbs and compounds in English, and thus to expand students’ knowledge of vocabulary in general and of phrasal verbs in particular.

The book is written as a textbook (in a framework of cognitive linguistics), intended primarily for guided self-learning for postintermediate or advanced learners; however, it can also be used in a classroom setting. Brygida Rudzka-Ostyn provides some suggestions for home and oral creative classroom activities. Working individually, the students can access the meaning of the phrasal verbs (a) by filling in verbs or nouns that are arranged alphabetically on top of each exercise, (b) by matching the expressions with the phrasal verbs (the first letters of each are indicated to the right of the sentence), or (c) in the key at the end of the chapter. R-O provides glosses at the end of each exercise in order to explain less frequently used expressions in a given context. The book is written in clear and lively language, supported by a glossary and a variety of schemas, tables, and examples.

In the introduction, R-O provides an overview of phrasal verbs, looking into their meanings and syntactic frames. She addresses the problem of understanding phrasal verbs and gives the examples of ‘spatial, prototypical or basic meanings’ of prepositions and particles (e.g. to run up a hill) and ‘metaphorical or extended meanings’ of the particles (e.g. Business is picking up, i.e. improving, becoming better). R-O employs a lot of schemas showing a mental representation of spatial relations. The book contains approximately 1,100 phrasal verbs and provides detailed study of seventeen particles/prepositions: out, in, into, up, down, off, away, on, over, back, about, (a)round, about/(a)round, across, through, by, along. These are combined with some 500 different verbs, adjectives, and nouns. The book is divided into seventeen chapters, where each chapter describes the peculiarities of a particular particle/preposition, such as its meaning or use. Each chapter is supported by exercises (with keys) and schemas that are focused on improving the understanding of the particles.

Clear language, good explanations, and well-constructed exercises make this book suitable for those who wish to understand phrasal verbs and thus expand their vocabulary.

Reviewed by Anna Pucilowski, University of Canterbury

Rather than add to an already large collection of standard grammars of Hindi, Annie Montaut aims to provide a description of modern standard Hindi within a functionalist framework. The book contains an introduction, three main sections on phonology, morphology, and syntax, and a conclusion.

In the introduction, M discusses the Hindi/Urdu debate, that is, whether the modern colloquial varieties of Hindi and Urdu are, in fact, the same language and the higher registers are simply two styles of the same language. M notes that, since the partition of India and Pakistan, politics has played a large role in the development of a distinctive Hindi language with closer links to Sanskrit than to Urdu or any regional languages. M chooses to describe the colloquial variety of Hindi, which is less sanskritized than the official version, and she mentions regional variations where relevant. Her purpose in this is to provide some information on language change and possible paths of grammaticization, and to highlight the fluidity of linguistic boundaries in the region. Her corpus is based on various styles of literature, conversations, film dialogues, and some newspapers. In the introduction M also describes the history of Hindi and its grammatical tradition.

Part 1 covers the phonology of Hindi. This is divided into seven sections: the writing system, Hindi sounds, phonemes and allophones, morphonological processes, syllabic structure, stress and syllabic structure, and historical evolution. Part 2 describes the morphology of Hindi, including the nominal constituent (Ch.1), the verbal constituent (Ch.2), and derivational morphology (Ch.3).

Part 3 looks at the syntax of Hindi. Ch. 1, ‘The simple sentence’, looks at basic clauses in Hindi. M describes the nominative and the ergative patterns of Hindi—a split-ergative language—as well as the dative, genitive, locative, and instrumental patterns. Hindi’s status as a split-ergative language, with the split based on aspect, makes it difficult to use terms like subject and object. M concludes with a discussion of case roles in Hindi, in particular the notion of subjecthood. Ch. 2 looks at complex sentences, including different types of subordination. Ch. 3 focuses on general structural questions, and looks at coordination, negation, interrogation, anaphora, and topicalization.

M concludes the book with a detailed discussion of some of the dialectal differences of Hindi, as well as some aspects of Hindi spoken outside of India. The book also contains an extensive bibliography. M’s detailed description free of strict theoretical restrictions makes this grammar interesting for any student of Hindi linguistics. The only difficulty I had with this book was the large number of errors in the English. Some careful editing would have made this book considerably easier to read.

Reviewed by Anna Pucilowski, University of Canterbury

Despite the fact that the Pacific region has long been treated as a kind of linguistic laboratory, its languages have not been prominent in the literature on borrowing. This volume addresses a variety of issues of borrowing in the Pacific. Although several of the papers cover borrowing from colonial languages like English and Dutch, others deal with borrowing between Pacific languages, something that is of much interest for the historian because of what it reveals about movements among Pacific people before European contact.

The first paper, by Bruce Biggs, was originally published in 1965. Biggs highlights the complexity of the linguistic history of Rotuman (Fiji) and, indeed, of all Pacific languages. The paper serves as a warning to historical linguists: failure to understand the extent to which one language has borrowed from another may lead to erroneous subgroupings.

Another paper that has been reprinted for this volume is Ross Clark’s paper on ‘necessary’ and ‘unnecessary’ borrowing. He looks at English loanwords in Ifira-Mele (Vanuatu) and concludes that need and cultural contact are inadequate explanations for their incorporation. G. B. Milner’s 1965 paper on initial nasal clusters in Eastern and Western Austronesian has also been included for its continued relevance.

Terry Crowley looks at attitudes toward borrowing among speakers of Pacific languages and concludes that, rather than threatening indigenous languages, borrowings have enriched the languages. His study of Sye (Vanuatu) refutes the claim that many Pacific languages are undergoing major structural change in the direction of English. Robert Early’s paper on periphrasis as a verbal borrowing strategy in Epi languages (Vanuatu) describes such a restructuring that may or may not reflect an imported pattern.

When speakers do perceive a threat to their language, there are alternatives to borrowing, as Ray Harlow shows in his paper on Māori. He observes that, in recent years, speakers have preferred to adapt or extend existing vocabulary rather than borrow from English. Another study of ‘nonborrowing’ is John Lynch’s paper on the influence of the languages of the Loyalty Islands and southern Vanuatu on Bislama, and of German on Samoan. Despite intensive contact between the languages, there has been very little borrowing. Lynch claims that this is due partly to phonological difficulty (in the case of Bislama), but also to social factors.

This volume includes several papers on specific cases of borrowing in the Pacific region, including Paul Geraghty’s paper on borrowed plant names in Fiji and Polynesia, Jim Hollyman’s paper on origin-oriented names in New Caledonia, and Paul Geraghty and Jan Tent’s paper on the influence of Dutch on the languages of the Pacific. Ulrike Mosel looks at how English words are adapted into Samoan, and Wolfgang Sperlich covers borrowing in Niuean.

There are also three papers on borrowing in the languages of Fiji. France Mugler investigates the influence of three Indian languages on Fijian Hindi, Fijian, and Fijian English. Albert J. Schütz covers English borrowings in Fijian, and Jan Tent looks at Fijian English and the source of its loanwords.

Reviewed by John D. Phillips, Yamaguchi University

This is a textbook designed to take beginning students of Welsh, working on their own, to a stage where they can begin to gain fluency by actually using the language. The author is an experienced organizer and teacher of intensive Welsh courses for adult learners, and one assumes that the book is built around material that he has found to work well in his own classes.

The book concentrates on spoken Welsh, presenting what Brake calls ‘written spoken Welsh’, which differs from traditional written Welsh in that the assimilated and abbreviated verb forms typical of colloquial speech are represented in the spelling (Y’c’n do the same sort o’ thing in English).

The style of presentation is traditional, organized around the grammar. On the whole, explanations are clear, and there are tables of paradigms where appropriate, and plenty of examples and exercises (with answers). After working through these, a student with a dictionary should be able to start reading newspapers and novels.

There is no accompanying tape or CD to demonstrate pronunciation, but all vocabulary items and many longer examples are given IPA transcriptions; and since Welsh spelling is phonemic, pronunciation need not be a problem. However, B’s brief explanations of phonemes (e.g. ll as ‘a voiceless l, /ɬ/’ or rh as ‘a voiceless r, /r̥/’) will not be much use to the average reader.

The first lesson begins with a detailed explanation of the Welsh system of initial consonant mutations, then moves on to gender and to the complexities of plural formation in nouns. It seems like a good idea to get these most irregular and difficult parts of the grammar out of the way first, but students might just give up under the (false) impression that Welsh is an unusually difficult language. The remaining eleven lessons work through the language at a comfortable pace.

Unfortunately the book is replete with errors. There are two English misspellings in the first line, and every subsequent page has several errors, often half a dozen or more to the page. There are spelling errors, sentences that do not parse, wrong cross-references, and wrong typefaces; some words and phrases are given wrong translations and wrong IPA transcriptions; a word will appear with one IPA transcription here and a slightly different one there; and though I am not a speaker of the author’s dialect, the IPA seems to be used inconsistently. Most mistakes in the translations and IPA will just confuse students, but plenty are not obvious from the context and will result in acquisition of incorrect Welsh.

In conception and design this is not a bad textbook. A proofreader and editor could have made it a useful addition to the range of Welsh texts, though it is expensive at two or three times the price of comparable books.  As it stands, I cannot recommend it. One hopes the publisher will arrange for a properly edited new edition.

Reviewed by Alexander Onysko, University of Innsbruck

Doleschal’s book on gender in Russian is a welcome addition to research on grammatical gender. The book starts out with a brief overview of typological characteristics of gender languages before focusing on established views of the formal aspects of gender in Russian and on how gender agreement is realized in Russian. What makes D’s book particularly valuable is its functional-cognitive approach to investigating gender, which is laid out in the two most substantial chapters (4 and 5).

In line with proponents of associative networks (cf. Phonology and language use, by Joan Bybee, Cambridge University Press, 2003), D’s explanation of gender assignment is based on a postulate of morphological and semantic associative schemas that activate gender categories in the mind of a speaker. In her model, assignment rules are translated into associative schemas, and gender is assigned according to the overall associative strength of activated schemas. This provides an alternative to the problem of rule ordering and hierarchies of semantic and morphological rules (cf. Gender, by Greville Corbett, Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Hybrid nouns in Russian (e.g. nouns that are morphologically feminine but semantically male) give rise to gender-resolution strategies, which, in D’s model, show increased associative strength following the natural gender of the reference object. Her data specifically shows a predilection for the feminine gender if reference is highly personal and specific. General personal reference favors the selection of masculine gender, while impersonal general reference tends to be marked with neuter gender.

As far as the occurrence of gender in natural languages is concerned, D emphasizes the function of gender as a cognitive aid to classification and thus to structuring the mental lexicon. Furthermore, gender primarily serves the function of establishing reference in discourse. Thus, gender-specific forms alleviate the cognitive load of the recognition of information units by establishing anaphoric and cataphoric links to nominal referents.

Throughout her book, D supports her argumentation with excerpts from Russian literature and with data from questionnaire-based elicitations. While the various sources substantiate her analysis of the reasons for gender assignment and of the role of gender in discourse, the empirical evidence would need a broader quantitative basis to allow drawing general conclusions.

Overall, D’s study is a comprehensive account of gender in Russian, the motivations for its assignment, and to a lesser extent its functions in discourse. Chs. 1 to 3 offer a general picture drawing from established positions of gender research (specifically from Corbett 1991). Chs. 4 and 5 include the author’s approach to modeling gender assignment and to explaining the discourse functions of gender in Russian. The major contribution of D’s book lies in the application of associative schemas as factors of gender assignment. She answers the interesting questions of why gender systems that occur in language do not venture farther than the immediate functional explanation of cognitive categorization, and of how they are involved in the establishment and marking of reference in discourse.

Reviewed by Dan Michel, University of Florida

Gunther Kaltenböck’s It-extraposition and non-extraposition in English presents a functionalist account of the alternation between it-extraposition and nonextraposition in English. The book proposes that the early traditional extraposition analysis, where the CP subject is moved to object position, does not adequately account for this alternation. While the transformational analysis that K argues against is no longer in widespread use, the remainder of the book is not adversely affected by this. K’s proposal is that a functionalist account is needed in addition to any transformational theory.

Ch. 1, ‘Introduction’ (1–9), briefly states the work’s intention and describes the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB), a computerized million-word database composed of 300 spoken and 200 written texts in various categories. Drawing from this corpus, K demonstrates that it-extraposition is statistically the unmarked form (1,701 occurrences) and that nonextraposition is substantially rarer (217 occurrences). Ch. 2, ‘Previous studies’ (10–26), criticizes previous work on extraposition for the lack of corpora, or for insufficiently representative corpora. Ch. 3, ‘Defining the class’ (27–64), proposes working definitions for the investigated structures, while acknowledging that some constructions seem to rest in fuzzy areas. Helpful summary charts are provided.

Ch. 4, ‘Formal properties of it-extraposition and non-extraposition’ (65–153), is a detailed report, including forty-six tables, of the environments in which the structures under scrutiny appear in the corpus. Preliminary explanations regarding distribution of the constructions are presented, but detailed support is not provided until Ch. 5.

Ch. 5, ‘Functional properties of it-extraposition and non-extraposition’ (154–278), constitutes the heart of the book. First K presents a multitude of theoretical frameworks for information structure, finally settling on a topic-comment structure neatly summarized in two tables (180). K groups it-extraposition into two informational types: Type 1 (given complement extraposition), which is backward-looking to comment on an old topic, and Type 2 (new complement extraposition), which is forward-looking to present a new topic (181). Of these, Type 1 is statistically marked (28.5% of it-extrapositions). Nonextraposition is also divided into two types: Type 1 (given subject clause) is also backward-looking but is here unmarked (80.2% of nonextraposition), while Type 2 (new subject clause) is marked (251). Collapsing the two types of referential duties, it-extraposition clearly favors the introduction of new content while the less common nonextraposition favors reference to prior information.

Ch. 6, ‘Conspectus: Factors influencing the choice of non-extraposition’ (279–93), collects factors from Ch. 5 that influence the use of nonextraposition, including formality and weight (word count) and information status. Ch. 7, ‘Summary and conclusion’ (294–98), extols the value of utilizing a corpus and the need for functional explanation to account for the earlier observation that the two constructs ‘are not usually interchangeable in a given context’ (279). Overall, this book provides a wealth of extraposition data and commentary. In addition, this book is an example of how a large corpus-based study can force one to reconsider what is marked, and the potential reasons for that markedness.

Reviewed by Sara McElmurry, Northeastern Illinois University

In an age when being politically correct is politically correct, Teun A. van Dijk’s Racism and discourse in Spain and Latin America examines the racist undertones that still readily permeate elite discourse in Spain and several Latin American nations. D synthesizes examples from a variety of sources—including the press, political commentary, popular culture, education, and everyday conversation—to explore racist ‘us’ versus ‘them’ themes stemming from both generations-old historical structures and recent immigration trends in Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. D also draws from examples of racist discourse in Cuba, Colombia, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Peru.

In Ch 1, ‘Racism and discourse’ (1–12), D opens with a reflection on racism, recognizing that although racism may present itself in discourse, its manifestations—including discrimination, marginalization, violence, and exclusion—extend far beyond the scope of discourse or language. Furthermore, D argues that discourse is often to blame for the reproduction of racism: ‘we all learn to be racist (or antiracist) through children’s literature, movies, TV programs, textbooks, conversations with friends, news reports and opinion articles, and so on’ (9).

D maintains that racism in its varying forms stems from polarized beliefs about ingroups (‘us’) and outgroups (‘them’). In Spain, as outlined in Ch. 2, ‘Elite discourse and racism in Spain’ (13–82), ‘us’ is a group of elite whites, while ‘them’ has traditionally included a Muslim, Arab, and Romaní (gitano) minority group. More recently, ‘them’ also includes new groups of immigrants from Africa, Latin America, and Asia. Racism is particularly highlighted in regions such as Catalonia and Andalusia, where immigration is considered a threat to autonomous identity, language, and culture.

In Ch. 2, D presents an analysis of discourse taken from the Spanish mass media, politicians, employers, academia, and the Catholic Church and concludes that while most discourse may not be blatantly racist, racism exists in most domains of society, especially toward new immigrant groups. Discourse surrounding immigration focuses on illegal immigration (rather than ‘regular’ immigration), crime, stereotypes, and cultural differences.

In Ch. 3, ‘Elite discourse and racism in Latin America’ (83–163), D reveals that the same racist trends hold true in Latin America, but the target of the racism in these countries is not new immigrants (with the exception of Koreans in Argentina). Rather, analysis of discourse from a variety of sources reveals underlying racist statements toward various indigenous groups, along with blacks in Brazil. Indigenous and black sources are rarely cited in newspapers; these groups are often associated with crime and are readily portrayed as victims in media coverage and in popular culture. In many Latin American countries, race is intertwined with class, with the latter often used by elites to justify inequalities in their countries.

While D holds politicians, the media, and academia responsible for eliminating racism in Spanish and Latin American society, he also calls for more research in the areas of discursive racism and ethnic relations. According to D, only a combined effort can effectively combat racism across the globe.