Standardsprache und Dialekte in mehrsprachigen Gebieten Europas: Akten des 2. Symposions über Sprachkontakt in Europa, Mannheim 1978 Ed. by P. Sture Ureland (review)

228 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 57, NUMBER 1 (1981) rectly on pp. 95 and 127, but incorrectly in the three examples on p. 1 1 1? On p. 44, mâr-banûtu is 'status of a free person', and rab-bitütu (78) is literally 'office of the chief-of-the-house', hardly 'great-householdness'. Marginal are 'they say' for itammu (42), 'stranger' for nakrum (40), ? put' for ëmid(96), 'assent ofgod' for the name migir-ili (96), and 'hearing' for teSmúm (110). Finally, determinatives are inconsistently represented on pp. 98 and 117 (above the line) vis-à-vis p. 74 (on the line), and several forms are given 'no meaning' for which an obvious one exists: zu-tim 'of sweat' (25), ka-aS 'to you' (6), li-ba-as 'may he come to shame' (9), sa-hu 'meadow' (28). [Daniel A. Foxvog, Berkeley.] Standardsprache und Dialekte in mehrsprachigen Gebieten Europas: Akten des 2. Symposions über Sprachkontakt in Europa, Mannheim 1978. Ed. by P. Sture Ureland . (Linguistische Arbeiten, 82.) Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1979. Pp. xiii, 266. Two groups of European sociolinguists, one clustering around the Linguistic Circle ofMannheim in Southwest Germany's province of Baden-Württemberg, the other staffing Brussels' Research Center for Plurilingualism, have jointly underwritten a program ofannual or semiannual colloquium-style meetings, each to be followed by the publication of its transactions. The first such end-of-the-year symposium (1977) was devoted to language contacts in the North Sea area (perhaps in imitation ofdistinctly earlier circumMediterranean studies, pioneered by Yugoslavia 's Mirko Deanovié?), and was reviewed briefly in Lg. 55.960-61 (1979). The following year's theme was not a territory or a bundle of sea-lanes and coastlines, but a type of confrontation : standard language vs. dialects in plurilingual sections of Europe. The outgrowth of that meeting is the volume under review. Responsible for both these volumes has been the same editor, P. Sture Ureland. Two more meetings have meanwhile taken place—one in June 1979, devoted to contacts and conflicts between languages, the other in December of that year, its keynote being 'Variation and language change'. It remains to be seen how many more such slogan-like unifying threads can be sug- gested , at the present accelerated rate of convocations. In his terse preface (ix-xiii), U aptly characterizes the recent change in the climate of Central European linguistics, including the growing influence ofAmerican research; then he attempts to fit each ofthe eight papers that make up the volume into that broad pattern, a feat which one would indeed expect of an editor. What U, conversely, has failed to provide is a description, however succinct, of the meeting itself: its size and organization, the prevailing atmosphere etc. It certainly is not irrelevant whether the eight pieces included in this venture represent a mere selection from among those read; whether they were circulated in advance; whether the timetable allowed for their revision; whether the round-table conference was strictly limited to twenty participants, oropen to a much larger audience. Readers' curiosity about such matters is not idle, and our disappointment increases as we examine the appended record of actual discussions (205-65), only to discover that as many as 12 discussants are identified there solely by their last names (Auburger, Braunmüller, Mrs. Cheyne, Engel etc.), whereas the contributors of articles are over-identified by their full names and residential addresses (266). The reason for this disparity eludes us, at this distance from the locale; unfortunately, this is by no means an isolated instance of carelessness about such matters on the West German scene. Of the eight articles—arranged not topically, as common-sense demanded, but in the alphabetical order of their authors' names—one, namely Peter H. Nelde's, is written in English: 'French interferences among a German-speaking minority' (105-24), with special reference to Eupen in Eastern Belgium. The remainder are in German. The areas under scrutiny are, typically, small—involving what the dialectologists call speech islets, and what students of political history and geography have traditionally referred to as enclaves. A good example is the piece by Norman Denison (a British, Cambridge -trained scholar stationed in Graz) on triglossia in...