Language in the USA: Themes for the twenty-first century (review)

Acknowledging a penumbral debt to an earlier, famous anthology bearing the same forename (Ferguson & Heath 1981), Finegan and Rickford have persuaded a distinguished assembly of over fifty scholars to write new, brief, introductory essays about current scientific knowledge and academic linguistic opinion on the ‘linguistic richness and variability of the United States’ (xvii). The approach is sociolinguistic, canonical, and politically engaged. The book’s three sections indicate the scope: Part 1: ‘American English’, Part 2: ‘Other language varieties’, and Part 3: ‘The sociolinguistic situation’.

F&R write, ‘[a] marketing constraint on … length meant omitting certain topics’ that were treated in the 1981 book (xviii). Notably deleted are chapters formerly dedicated to ‘Italian’, ‘French and German’, ‘Slavic’, ‘Jews’, ‘Filipinos’, and ‘The language of the law’ (inexplicably, medical language nonetheless remains in Cynthia Hagstrom’s new article, ‘The language of doctors and patients’). Pages devoted to Native American languages were cut from 64 to 29. Even so, the Spanish chapters have doubled (Ana Celia Zentella, ‘Spanish in the Northeast’; Carmen Silva-Corvalán, ‘Spanish in the Southwest’), and F&R have added other useful new topics judged more relevant today: ‘Hip Hop Nation language’ (H. Samy Alim), ‘Linguistic diversity and English language acquisition’ (Robert Bayley), ‘Ebonics and its controversy’ (John Baugh), ‘Language, gender, and sexuality’ (Mary Bucholtz), ‘Slang’ (Connie Eble), ‘Adolescent language’ (Penelope Eckert), ‘The Dictionary of American Regional English’ (Joan Houston Hall), ‘Asian American voices’ (Thom Huebner and Linda Uyechi), ‘The language of cyberspace’ (Denise E. Murray), and ‘Linguistic identity and community in American literature’ (James Peterson). Especially welcome additions to the canon of current sociolinguistic subdisciplines are ‘American Sign Language’ (Ceil Lucas and Clayton Valli) and Dennis Preston’s ‘Language attitudes to speech’, a summary of the important field of perceptual dialectology.

Other topics have not changed, just the authors: Richard Bailey provides an elegant and pithy lead article, ‘American English: Its origins and history’, followed by Finegan’s own ‘American English and its distinctiveness’. Patricia Nichols has an article on creoles in both the 1981 and 2004 volumes, with the 2004 title being ‘Creole languages: Forging new identities’. Lily Wong Fillmore contributes on ‘Language in education’.

While the articles are clear, authoritative, and factually sound, the book’s real use is unclear. I personally am happy to have it on my bookshelf, where it serves, as do Ferguson & Heath 1981 and Greenbaum 1985, as a kind of mini-encyclopedia for an important strand in contemporary linguistics. F&R, however, seek a much wider audience. Whoever wrote the introductory marketing blurb presumably had their permission to call it a ‘textbook’ that ‘will be welcomed by students across the disciplines of English, Linguistics, Communication Studies, American Studies and Popular Culture’ (i). In keeping with such a purpose, each chapter begins with an ‘Editors’ introduction’ and ends with ‘Suggestions for further reading and exploration’ (presumably compiled by the chapter authors, not F&R), and there is a breezy, patronizing, four-page ‘Foreword’ by Geoffrey Nunberg, a popular writer and public-radio personality, who here lectures the linguistically unsophisticated about ‘chronic American blindness to the complexities of our sociolinguistic history and of the contemporary linguistic situation’ (xv) and presses upon the linguistic novice the solemn significance of the enterprise (‘Language in the USA will unquestionably be an important resource for policymakers and decision-makers, and it should make us all better citizens’ (xvi)).

At least since the publication of Ferguson & Heath 1981, universities have offered introductory ‘Language in the USA’ courses, and this volume, like its predecessor, could be used as a reader in such a course, though only if...