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444LANGUAGE, VOLUME 76, NUMBER 2 (2000) REFERENCES Anttila, Raimo. 1972. Historical and comparative linguistics. New York: Macmillan. Bender, Marvin L. 1974. Omotic: A new Afro-Asiatic language family. (Southern Illinois University Museum Series 3.) Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Bendor-Samuel, John (ed.) 1989. The Niger-Congo languages. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Bennett, Patrick R., and Jan P. Sterk. 1977. South Central Niger-Congo: A reclassification. Studies in African Linguistics 8.241-73. Bimson, Kent. 1978. Comparative reconstruction of proto-Northern-Western Mande. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms. Crowley, Terry. 1996. Introduction to historical linguistics. London: Oxford University Press. Dwyer, David. 1973. The comparative tonology of Southwestern Mande nomináis. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms. ------. 1974. The historical development of Southwestern Mande consonants. Studies in African Linguistics 5.59-94. ------. 1989. Mande. In Bendor-Samuel, 44-55. Greenberg, Joseph H. 1963. The languages of Africa. The Hague: Mouton. Gudschinsky, Sarah. 1956. The ABC's of lexicostatistics (glottochronology). Word 12.175-210. Lehmann, Winfred P. 1962. Historical linguistics: An introduction. New York: Holt. Meinhof, Carl. 1906. Grundztlge einer vergleichenden Grammatik der Bantusprachen. Berlin. 2nd edn. Hamburg: Reimer, 1948. Welmers, William E. 1970. Language change and language relationships in Africa. Language Sciences 12.1-8. Westermann, Diedrich. 1927. Die westlichen Sudansprachen und ihre Beziehungen zum Bantu. Berlin: de Gruyter. Department of English Ball State University Muncie, IN 47306 [hstahlke@bsu.edu] Queerly phrased: Language, gender, and sexuality. Ed. by Anna Livia and Kira Hall. (Oxford studies in sociolinguistics.) New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. 460. Reviewed by Sara Trechter, California State University, Chico Anna Livia and Kira Hall present 25 diverse articles concerning gay and lesbian expression that are a significant contribution to the growing field of queer language studies. Like most collections in language, gender, and sexuality, there is variety in the analytic approaches of the articles. They draw on literary theory, discourse analysis, phonology, semantics, and anthropology and include data from AAVE, ASL, French, Hausa, Hindi, and Japanese. Individual authors focus on a broad range of linguistic and queer concerns. For example, Tina Neumann describes the parallel discourse structures emergent in the double identity of a deaf lesbian's ASL comingout narrative. Elizabeth Morrish draws on critical discourse analysis to tease apart the presuppositions , themes, and intertextual connections of mainstream British newspapers as they stereotypically construct homosexuals. Bruce Bagemihl offers an extended analogy for understanding the same-sex desire of transsexuals by comparing transsexual queers to languages which express sounds through surrogate phonologies, using lutes, drums, etc. Given L & H's purposeful inclusion of such diverse material, their introduction provides a theoretical link connecting the articles to linguistic performativity and performativity to queer theory. The problem they see for the investigation of queer language is that past analyses relied on either linguistic determinism or social constructionism, the former leading researchers to dismiss the existence of gay culture unless it was encoded and the latter to eschew cross-cultural generalizations because discourse is specific to time and place (10). To solve the conundrum of an essentialist definition of gay vs. the inability to make any statement about liminal language REVIEWS445 at all, L & H locate their book at the crossroads of Butler's (1990) queer theory adaptations of performativity and its linguistic roots in Austin (1975). A focus on 'what people do with words' potentially offers analyses abstract enough to accommodate disparate cultures and historical change (13). Its success depends on the extent to which individual researchers succeed in defining performative commonalities for queering language without returning to identity as definition, e.g., 'Queering language is what queers do with language'. The book divides into three sections: (1) 'Liminal lexicality'—items denoting alternative sexual identities; (2) 'Queerspeak'—discourse strategies that might be taken as gay; and (3) 'Linguistic gender-bending'—the transformation of gendered linguistic systems. Several common themes arise out of this consideration of language of the periphery. These include a tension between resistance as secrecy/silence and performed opposition with uptake of intentional irony, the linguistic restrictions on ludic responses, and adequate definitions of the object of analysis when the goal of queering is resistance to hegemonic definition. An introduction to each of the three major sections would have helped...

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