I shall begin this brief contribution with a small amount of self-justification, since I appear to have become picked out as one of the “bad guys” in Trudgill's thesis. I shall then go on to agree with some of Trudgill's points, but not with all. In particular, I shall conduct a small thought experiment on the link between accommodation and the development of new dialects.

Dagmar Dueber, Nigerian Pidgin English: Language contact, variation and change in an African urban setting. London: Battlebridge, 2005. Pp. xiii, 273. Pb £25.

This is a corpus-based study of Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) among the educated in the urban center of Lagos. Deuber's report on the use of NPE in Lagos makes for interesting comparison with the spread and use of other contact varieties in urban areas in Africa (e.g., Sheng in Nairobi; see Fink 2005 and references therein) and its impact on indigenous languages. It is also comparable with the discussions of urban varieties of creoles reported in Patrick's (1999) work and more recently in Hackert 2004. One of the obvious issues is the functioning of the variety in new public formal domains. Issues related to both corpus and status planning are discussed (cf. Devonish 1986). To help the reader navigate the vast amount of data, there are several maps, sample questionnaires, and complete transcriptions from elicitations and interviews. The included CD contains sociodemographic data for all the informants and background information on the texts, translations, and sound samples. The book should prove beneficial to sociolinguists of varying persuasions, especially creolists, variationists, and discourse analysts.

Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, Marjatta Palander, and Esa Penttilä (eds.), Dialects across borders. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. xii, 291, Hb $138.00.

This volume offers a selection of papers originally presented at the Eleventh International Conference on Methods in Dialectology held at the University of Joensuu, North Karelia, Finland in 2002. The conference's theme has been taken as the title of the book, and each of the essays included here explores the influence of borders on linguistic behavior. For readers who might assume this collection to represent only the tradition of dialect geography it is important to note that the editors had a rather expansive sense of “border” in selecting the essays, and as a result the contributors display a broad range of ways of conceptualizing borders and their influence. The papers are grouped thematically according to the types of borders they examine: Those in Part I deal with borders in the usual geographical sense, those in Part II explore borders that are more social or cognitive in character, and those in Part III investigate borders between languages. The editors open the book with an introduction that sketches the contents of each essay.

There is much that any sociolinguist would agree with in Peter Trudgill's essay. It is written in his usual lucid style, and supported by a wealth of detail, reflecting his extensive knowledge, research, and scholarly expertise. However, it is stimulatingly provocative on the issue of why particular variants win out in dialect contact situations. Our response falls into two sections: (i) the identity issue, and (ii) the New Zealand situation.

There is nothing controversial about Keller's assertion that human beings operate according to a powerful maxim which he renders as “Talk like the others talk.” This is self-evidently true (although we could of course discuss precisely who “the others” might be). If it were not true, there would be, say, no local dialects. The fact that everyone who has grown up in the same community speaks in the same way therefore, in a sense, needs no discussion. It is always the case, as near enough as makes no difference.

Ken Hyland, Metadiscourse: Exploring interaction in writing. London & New York: Continuum. 2005. Pp. x, 230. Hb £75.00, Pb £25.00.

Metadiscourse is increasingly recognized as fundamental to the way in which writers construct text to achieve their communicative goals, but it remains a somewhat vague concept in certain respects, and the term is used in different ways by different scholars; so a full-scale treatment of the phenomenon is potentially of great interest. Ken Hyland has published a number of articles in recent years on metadiscourse, and he is clearly well placed to write this survey of the topic, designed, according to the blurb, as an “accessible introduction” for students of applied linguistics and teachers, as well as academics. The book is divided into three main parts: The first reviews previous attempts to define metadiscourse and proposes a revised definition and classification; the second, and longest, explores the functions of metadiscourse in a range of different types of text; and the third focuses specifically on the language classroom and suggests ways in which students can be encouraged to improve their command of metadiscourse.

First, I would like to thank Dr. Wong for his insightful and supportive review of my book. At the same time, I am grateful to the editor for being given an opportunity to clarify a few minor points of disagreement.

Joseph A. Foley (ed.), Language, education and discourse: Functional approaches. London: Continuum, 2004. Pp. xii, 337. Hb. $150.00, Pb. $49.95.

Since it was developed by Michael Halliday more than 40 years ago, Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has become increasingly influential in discourse analytic and educational studies. Readers interested in this approach will find illustrations of the theory and its applications in this product of the International Systemic Functional Linguistics Association meeting in 1999 in Singapore. SFL, a theory of language that links meaning with form and describes language in terms of its role in social contexts, offers researchers interested in language in society theoretically grounded ways of focusing on the meaning-making resources of language. These SFL studies, in contexts that span the years of schooling and focus on a range of disciplinary contexts, including mathematics, history, science, and language arts, highlight the power of classroom discourse and the role of language in construing ideologies.

Anne O'Keeffe, Investigating media discourse. London: Routledge. 2006. Pp. x, 180. Pb $24.99.

Researchers who examine media discourse play in a field made wide by the polysemy of both of the constituent terms that name it. While “media” texts appear in newspapers, on television, on the web, on the radio, in film, in books, and in magazines, among others, most studies can only afford to focus on a single medium and on a single layer of media production or media language. And “discourse” presents its usual problems of site and scale: Are we examining cultures, professions, performances, texts, and/or linguistic features? Although all of these can claim to be parts of discourse, most studies can only afford to focus in detail on a single layer.