Linguistique de terrain sur langues en danger: locuteurs et linguistes ed. by Colette Grinevald, Michel Bert (review)

author’s feat, however, also places demands on the reader. The fourteen-page glossary of terms and the translations of foreign quotations provide some help, but several crucial aids are omitted, such as a map of place names, a table or list of languages, and a timeline of important events. Readers would also benefit from a complete subject index rather than a limited index of languages and linguistic and literary terms. In the current index, readers can look up the eighty-nine pages where“French”appears, but not people, texts, or events, such as Charlemagne, the Strasbourg Oaths, or the Battle of Hastings. This book is best suited then for serious medieval scholars or specialists interested in a well-documented example of linguistic marketplaces that, as the author suggests, may provide instructive comparisons with other medieval societies (376– 78) or even with the present-day global economy dominated by English (11). University of Georgia Diana L. Ranson Grinevald, Colette, et Michel Bert, éd. Linguistique de terrain sur langues en danger: locuteurs et linguistes. Paris: Ophrys, 2011. ISBN 978-2-7080-1292-9. Pp. 556. 58 a. Research on endangered languages has fieldwork at its heart,thus making the interactions and relationships between speakers of endangered languages and researchers who study them a crucial element of language description and documentation projects. Grinevald and Bert keep the focus on this human aspect of fieldwork and on speakers of endangered languages in this volume, which is composed of twenty-two chapters on a variety of languages and research settings, as well as a preface, postface, and annexes. The editors bring many years of experience to this project, and the result is a dense and hefty volume that introduces to Francophone readers and researchers what has been, up to now, a mainly Anglophone literature. In the first part of the book, Grinevald presents the study of endangered languages and traces its history and development as a subfield of linguistics. Her chapter on fieldwork approaches and methods is a true primer for how to conduct fieldwork on endangered languages; she provides a step-by-step guide to the research process (what occurs before, during, and after the actual fieldwork), illustrated with examples from her own projects. Both editors give engaging and detailed accounts of their own research trajectories and then together propose a French typology of the speakers of endangered languages. Several contributions address the remarkable diversity of speakers found in endangered language contexts, emphasizing especially the challenges inherent in choosing speakers for documentation projects and the danger of possible errors or omissions on the part of the speaker or the linguist undertaking the description of the language based on oral production. The second half of the book is composed of “récits de terrain”from diverse minority language contexts ranging from Central and South America to Africa and Cambodia. These first-person accounts of fieldwork experiences keep the focus on 184 FRENCH REVIEW 87.4 Reviews 185 the relationships between linguists and speakers of endangered languages and on the speakers themselves. The narratives often include not only a description of the fieldwork situation but also a detailed account of the genesis and development of the research projects; the reader sees how these linguists have engaged with the endangered language population, as well as with methodological aspects of their research. The conversational writing style and detailed descriptions of a personal nature may seem somewhat curious to linguists accustomed to a more scientific style of writing, but this approach no doubt renders the content more accessible to non-native readers and novice linguists. In the annex, the vitality of six of the languages discussed in the book is assessed according to UNESCO criteria, which highlights once again the diversity of these endangered language contexts.With this volume, Grinevald and Bert have made an important contribution to the growing collection of Francophone research on the study of endangered languages. This book could be useful for a French graduate course on fieldwork methods or applied linguistics; chapters on minority languages of France could be pertinent for students of dialectology. University of Louisiana, Lafayette Tamara Lindner Turpin, Béatrice, éd. Discours et sémiotisation de l’espace: les repr...