Parcours d’un sociolinguiste: banlieue nord de Paris/La Réunion by Jacky Simonin (review)

conscience:“Suivront-ils le chemin habituel des innovations pédagogiques, c’est-à-dire l’oubli après une brève période d’hubris didactique, ou bien sont-ils là pour influencer l’enseignement des langues dans la durée?” (71). Although the studies in this volume reflect political, economic, and pedagogical concerns within a European context, the take-away is far more universal. Pedagogical orthodoxy is the order of the day within the American academic context as well: consider the sacred/political space populated by the proliferation of guidelines, standards and“authorized”curricula. Caveat lector: the variety of disciplinary approaches may strike a discordant note, or worse, discourage a more global reading. Granted, the contemporary philosophy professor’s anxieties over disserto-centrisme (43) seem unrelated to the philologist’s etymological preoccupations. Transcending these discipline-specific exempla, the contributors to this volume succeed admirably in contesting the notion of norm as revealed doctrine, and convince us of the urgency in identifying and resolving the disconnect between non-privileged practice and a factitious global consensus. Cabrillo College/Graduate Theological Union (CA) H. Jay Siskin Simonin, Jacky. Parcours d’un sociolinguiste: banlieue nord de Paris/La Réunion. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2012. ISBN 978-2-336-00101-2. Pp. 328. 33,50 a. This book depicts the journey of the sociolinguist Jacky Simonin, a professor at Université Paris-Nord Villetaneuse in the 1970s and later at Université de La Réunion. “La recherche c’est bien un combat”(191), he once said, addressing doctoral students. Simonin’s work looked at language contact, linguistic innovation, language interferences , and Reunionese creolization. The book consists of a compilation of nineteen texts gathered by Bernard Idelson and Gudrun Ledegen to honor Simonin’s contributions to the field of sociolinguistics.The texts are eclectic;the reader will find an interview, lectures, conference papers, and articles that give an overview of Simonin’s influence in the field. The book starts with an interview in which Simonin expresses his approach to the practice of sociolinguistics, discussing how his work on oral discourse in the 1970s was innovative, since most linguistic research was on the written form at that time. In the same interview, Simonin speaks about researchers who inspired him: Garfinkel, Sacks, Hymes’s ethnography of speaking, and Gumperz’s interactional linguistic approach. These scholars’ research methods convinced Simonin that practicing sociolinguistics to improve the understanding of interactional behavior needed to be done through fieldwork, ethnographic studies, and conversation analysis, leading him to translate some of Gumperz’s work into French to introduce this approach to the French linguistics field. The reader will also find numerous articles relating to the use of French and Reunionese Creole in everyday life, as well as in the schools. In “Parler réunionnais,” for instance, Simonin discusses the lack of agreement on a 200 FRENCH REVIEW 87.2 Reviews 201 standardized writing system of Reunionese Creole and the stigmatization of Réunion Creole when compared to metropolitan French. In another article, Simonin analyses linguistic hybridization through cross-cultural misunderstandings between a Reunion island wife and her “z’oreil” (45) husband, a metropolitan French speaker. The analysis of their interactions shows code-switching, creolization and language métissage, such as the husband’s use of the intensifier marker même as used in Reunionese Creole, as in “Je l’ai acheté même.” It should be noted that many of the articles touch upon the dominant position of the French language in schools and the minority status of Creole, a topic that is still current. Simonin compelled the field of French linguistics to consider approaches developed on the other side of the Atlantic, and this book reflects his contributions to the field. He was a pioneer who looked at the field of sociolinguistics as a carrefour discipline connecting linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and many other domains. While this méli-mélo of texts gives an overview of the trajectory of a seminal researcher in sociolinguistics, some of the texts are more general and may not be appropriate for scholars or students of linguistics. On a more positive note, this sampling of texts offers an honest, humanistic, and organic view of an important scholar’s...