little to offer. ted from the expertise of the writers, it has

Steiner, George, 1975. University Press.

After Babel: Aspects of language and translation. London: Oxford

icar eguy, eds., English across Cultures, Cultures ader in Cross-Cultural Communications. Berlin and New

York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1989. xxi + 492 pp. DM 178.00 (bound).

Reviewed by Mary PENR

This reader is in the Contributions to the Sociology of Language series, whose general editor is Joshua F an, and, like many of the other volumes, it is stimulating, provocative a ery readable. The husband and wife editorial team have selected articles from many parts of the world, each providing information on either the effects of English on other cultures or the effects of other cultures on English. t is this duality which distinguishes this volume from the many which deal with the spread of English around the world. Garcia and Otheguy provide insights into the interactions between peoples who use English but whose cultures and world views are so different that it is perhaps even questionable that they are using ‘the same language’.

The study of such interactions is provided by papers from writers in Britain and Ireland, Africa, North America, the Caribbean, the Indian Sub-Conti- nent, the Far East, Australia and the Pacific. The percipient reader has two types of data to examine: that provided consciously by the individual authors and that provided unconsciously because a number of the writers are them- selves writing in a language which is not their mother tongue or which has only recently been used to express a non-English culture.

* Correspondence address: M. Penrith, School of English, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK.

Book notices 843

Apart from twenty pages of preliminary material and a ten-page introduc- tion by the editors, the book is divided into two parts, each of which is then subdivided into two sections. Part ! deals with 'English across Cultures', the first part of the book's title. Section I contains six papers, all concerned with the notion of how a person's knowledge of an interlocutor's background may affect inter-ethnic communication. The first three describe and discuss some of the concepts useful to a scholarly description of inter-ethnic commu- nication. Verschueren's paper, 'English as object and medium of (mis)under- standing', is perhaps representative of the approach adopted by the first three writers in his analysis of data to illustrate aspects of the cross-cultural use of English. The second three papers are linked by the fact that they all describe inter-ethnic communication in the classroom. Perhaps the most stimulating part of these papers is the evidence they adduce for claiming that a shared knowledge of culture is even more necessary for meaningful communication than shared linguistic codes. As Saville-Troike and Kieifgen put it:

"... a relatively l:igh level of positive transfer of non-linguistic elements enabled children to function in a new school setting while having but limited proficiency in the language of instruction.'" (p. 101)

Section 2 has four papers which highlight problems of communication among speakers in South Africa, Canada, Sri Lanka and Australia. These papers deal with issues that are not easy to quantify, such as the effect of socio-political restraints on full inter-ethnic communication. The fourth paper, by Judith Kearins, is a link with those in Section l in that she shows with great clarity and sensitivity how the misunderstandings between white Australian teachers and their Aboriginal pupils could be reduced if teachers knew more about the cultural attitudes, practices and aspirations of their fellow Australians.

The second part of the book, 'Cultures across English' is also divided into two sections. Section 3 has seven papers, which deal with the influence of the speakers' sociolinguistic backgrounds on their use and forms of English. The papers include discussions of dialect-speaking Americans, linguistic standards in the Caribbean, the implications of decreolization, the linguistic uses of Singaporeans who are bilingual in Hokkien and English but not bicultural, the flexibility in vocabulary usage in Cameroon, West Africa and the systema- tic differences between Catholic and Protestant speakers in Northern Ireland. The last paper here, 'Cultures in Conflict: Varieties of English in Northern Ireland' by Loreto Todd, reminds the reader that linguistic differences are not necessarily short-lived. Nor are they simply societal mannerisms. In a country like Northern Ireland, where the English of some speakers still reflects their ancestral mother tongue, Irish, different forms of English can result in a polarisation that can lead to mistrust and civil war.

844 Book notices

The final section has five papers which tend to focus on what the editors call ~'the impact of differences in socio-psychoiogicai identity of interlocutors" (p. xxi). In these, we travel from the Black English in classrooms in Britain, to a Puerto Rican community in New York, to English used by bilingual Mexican-Americans or Chicanos, to attitudes to pronunciation, and finally to a stimulating essay on Indian literature in English.

In a book such as this, it is an interesting and insightful irony that a female author whose first name ends in -o is assumed by the editors to be male. This little detail, perhaps more than any other in the book, reminds the reader that we are all - teachers and students, female and male, African and Caucasian - so conditioned by our mother tongue and our early culture that we do not realize the assumptions that we bring to bear in interacting with others.

English across Cultures, Cultures across English is a well-written, carefully edited book. The contributors all have a deep understanding of their areas of research and many of the papers are p,sitive in their view that knowledge can, if properly used, lead to understanding and integration.