<b>The language, ethnicity and race reader</b> . Ed. by Roxy Harris and Ben Rampton. London: Routledge, 2003. Pp. x, 357. ISBN 0415276020. $32.95.

Reviewed by: The language, ethnicity and race reader ed. by Roxy Harris and Ben Rampton Zdenek Salzmann The language, ethnicity and race reader. Ed. by Roxy Harris and Ben Rampton. London: Routledge, 2003. Pp. x, 357. ISBN 0415276020. $32.95. Interdisciplinary works—collections of articles included—are always welcome, particularly if the [End Page 777] mix of subjects has not been much explored. This reader, assembled by two members of the faculty of the School of Social Science and Public Policy at King’s College in London, is an attempt to fill the gap, and the readers of this journal may be interested in learning to what extent language influences or is influenced by ethnicity and race (a somewhat outdated concept, at least in American anthropology). The twenty-five chapters are assigned to three sections: (1) ‘Colonialism, imperialism and global process’, (2) ‘Nation-states and minorities’, and (3) ‘Language, discourse and ethnic style’. Some aspects of language concern or linguistic research are present in virtually all of the papers, and the bulk of them (fourteen) have been published since 1990. The book begins with Otto Jespersen’s discussion of the origin of speech, written in 1922. With so many recent and much better argued theories of language origin, one wonders why a paper that talks about ‘languages of contemporary savages’ and appears to distinguish between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilized’ languages was included. A chapter from Edward Sapir’s Language (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921), which follows, is much more appropriate in its argument that there are no intrinsic relationships between language and race or language and culture, though this point had been made earlier by Franz Boas. The only other ‘classic’ article is Benjamin Lee Whorf’s ‘An American Indian model of the universe’. It is true that during the 1930s Whorf popularized the subject of the language-culture relationship, but some of his comments were oversimplified or overdrawn. A number of the contributions published since 1990 may be of particular interest to linguists. Some examples: In ‘The World Bank, the language question and the future of African education’ (85–96), Alamin Mazrui discusses the nature of the present relationship between English and the native African languages of some of the former British colonies. Ben Rampton, in ‘Displacing the “native speaker”: Expertise, affiliation and inheritance’ (107–11), argues that some of the connotations of the traditional terms ‘native speaker’ and ‘mother tongue’ have recently become strongly contested because nationality and ethnicity do not necessarily imply language ability and language allegiance. In ‘Language, youth and the destabilisation of ethnicity’ (188–98), Roger Hewitt shows that ‘unified’ ethnic cultures are far more complicated than has been thought. His example deals with ethnic groups of young people in urban England whose forms of speech influence each other and thus produce new forms of English. In Hewitt’s opinion, the behavior of many urban ethnic cultures might be better understood as ‘polycultural’—that is, ‘[not] discrete and complete in themselves … [or] “intrinsically equal” … [but] active together’ (190). The localities from which the data are drawn range geographically over several continents: Jamaica, several African countries, Singapore, Tucson (‘Mock Spanish’), Basque country, francophone Canada, and elsewhere. Most of the papers deal with recent or contemporary problems, and a good portion of them originally appeared in publications that are likely to escape the attention of American scholars and students. The editors have provided the collection with a general introduction and more focused introductions to each of the three sections. Zdenek Salzmann Northern Arizona University Copyright © 2005 Linguistic Society of America

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