MULTILINGUAL COMMUNICATION. Julian House and Jochen Rehbein (Eds.). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2004. Pp. vii + 358. $90.00 cloth.

Studies on multilingualism embody a range of theoretical approaches, research paradigms, and methods. In this book, the third publication in the Hamburg studies on multilingualism series, the focus is on the form-function relationship between the languages involved in multilingual communication and on the mechanisms that relate multilingual communicative processes to social structures. The volume consists of 11 chapters divided into three sections, and two useful appendixes (author and subject indexes). The editing is highly competent and the selection of papers is excellent in quality and scope. Papers mostly emerge from colloquia on linguistic aspects of multilingualism organized by the Research Centre on Multilingualism at the University of Hamburg; many provide access to empirical studies that had previously existed only as unpublished manuscripts or research reports. Most of the contributions deal with the creation of differentiated, multilingual communication systems due to the mutual influence of languages in contact, whereas others deal with functional explanations of problems in second language (L2) use.