Élőnyelvi tanulmányok: Az MTA Nyelvtudományi Intézetében 1988. október 5-6-án rendezett élőnyelvi tanácskozás előadásai. [Studies of the living language: Papers from the Living Language Conference at the Linguistics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, October 5-6, 1988] Edited by Lajos Balogh and Miklós Kontra (review)

REVIEWS171 REFERENCES Clark, Marybeth. 1989. Hmong and areal South-East Asia. South-East Asian linguistics , no. 11: South-East Asian syntax, ed. by David Bradley (Pacific Linguistics , A-77), 175-230. Canberra: Department of Linguistics, School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. Daniels, Peter T. 1990. Fundamentals of grammatology. Journal of the American Oriental Society 110.727-31. Fuller, Judith Wheaton. 1985. Topic and comment in Hmong. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota dissertation. [Published, Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club, 1988.] Gelb, I. J. 1963. A study of writing. 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heimbach, Ernest E. 1969. White Hmong—English dictionary. (Southeast Asian Program , Linguistic series 4, Data paper 75.) Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Department of Asian Studies. Lyman, Thomas A. 1974. Dictionary of Mong Njua. The Hague: Mouton. ------. 1979. Grammar of Mong Njua (Green Miao): A descriptive linguistic study. Sattley , CA: Blue Oak Press, 1979. Smalley, William A. 1976. The problems of consonants and tone: Hmong. Phonemes and orthography: Language planning in ten minority languages of Thailand, ed. by W. A. Smalley (Pacific Linguistics, C-43), 85-123. Canberra: Department of Linguistics , School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University. Strecker, David, et al. 1987. The Hmong-Mien languages. (Linguistics of the TibetoBurman Area 10:2.) Berkeley: University of California Press. Xiong, Lang; Joua Xiong; and Nao Leng Xiong. 1983. English-Mong-English dictionary . Milwaukee: Mong Volunteer Literacy. Department of Linguistics[Received 15 July 1991.] University of Colorado Boulder, CO 80309-0295 Élonyelvi tanulmányok: Az MTA Nyelvtudományi Intézetében 1988. Oktober 5-6-án rendezett élonyelvi tanácskozás eloadásai. [Studies of the living language : Papers from the Living Language Conference at the Linguistics Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, October 5-6, 1988.] Edited by Lajos Balogh and Miklós Kontra. (Lingüistica, Series A: Studia et Dissertationes, 3.) Budapest: Linguistics Institute ofthe Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 1990. Pp. vi, 228. Paper Ft 180. Reviewed by Jeffrey Harlig, Indiana University Sociolinguistics as a distinct field of investigation has had a very slow start in Hungary. Only in the last five years has there been concentrated work on the forms of everyday language, to say nothing of the social distribution of particular lexical items and grammatical structures. Élonyelvi tanulmányok (ET) is one of the first published signs of the new work going on in Hungary. The importance of ET cannot be appreciated without knowledge of the historical and intellectual context in which the studies were conducted and have now been published. Three factors have impeded the development of a linguistics oriented toward 172LANGUAGE, VOLUME 68, NUMBER 1 (1992) colloquial speech: a long-standing emphasis in language studies on preservation and cultivation of the Hungarian language; almost exclusive attention to the written language and a highly idealized spoken variant of it in descriptive studies ; and Marxist decrees on the nature and function of language, the status of dialects and speech varieties, and the organization of society. The third factor, from a systemic point of view, is gone, which makes the emerging state of affairs particularly interesting. The first two of these factors continue to be in force, though their influence is waning. The normative tradition has a long and powerful history in Hungary. A dictionary whose main purpose was to standardize word forms and spellings was published in 1832 by the precursor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Deme 1972). The prescriptivistjournal Magyar Nyelvbr ('Hungarian Language Guardian') has been in continuous publication since 1872. Hungarian newspapers , magazines, andjournals are filled with usage columns that make James Kilpatrick and Edwin Newman appear irredeemably lax. The culmination of this tradition to date is the two-volume Nyelvmuvelb kézikonyv ('Language Cultivation Handbook', Grétsy & Kovalovszky 1980/1985), a 2600-page compendium of usage advice on every conceivable topic. The blend of socialist and normativist ideology behind this handbook is a topic worthy of extensive coverage in its own right. Against this backdrop ET represents a significant step forward for Hungarian descriptive linguistics and sociolinguistics. Several of the papers, though tentative in many respects, offer an explanatory and analytical alternative to the entire history of Hungarian normative linguistics, which has treated variation in one way: as 'right...