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The English-Only Question by Dennis BaronReview by: Barbara HoekjeThe Modern Language Journal, Vol. 77, No. 4 (Winter, 1993), pp. 556-557Published by: Wiley on behalf of the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers AssociationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/329709 .

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556 The Modern Language Journal 77 (1993)

tionary, but, all things considered, it is defi- nitely a dictionary worth using.

MUTSUKO ENDO HUDSON Michigan State University

YONEKAWA, AKIHIKO. Beyond Polite Japa- nese: A Dictionary ofJapanese Slang and Colloquial- isms. Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1992. Pp. ix, 173. $8.00, paper.

This small dictionary purports to help students learn Japanese beyond college textbooks that use predominantly polite styles. It is intended for use by students who have already mastered a basic foundation of Japanese. Divided into ten different sections with such titles as "People," "Personality types and temperatures," "The body and its functions," "Action and change," "Interjections and exclamation," "Slang- forming prefixes and suffixes," etc., the dictionary presents about 700 words of slang and colloquial expressions. As the author says, the division is arbitrary. Some chapters are topic- based, while others are morphologically based. In fact, this division makes this dictionary easy to read. At the end, there is an alphabetical index of all listings.

Each entry consists of an entry word in romanization and in the common Japanese or- thography, the literal meaning, English definitions or equivalents, one or two examples written in Japanese and romanization, English translations of the word, and comments about the etymology or notes on usage. All the examples are authentic and capture the tone of colloquial Japanese. Many of them are not only hu- morous but also depict vividly sociocultural aspects of Japanese life, which makes this dictionary highly entertaining and insightful. The English gloss given to each entry and example sentence are natural and adequate.

The criteria for the selection of entry words and expressions are frequency of use, use- fulness, and interest to the readers. Because of these criteria, many different types and levels of colloquialisms and slang are presented, from kisama to rajikase to asuko to very vulgar slang. Some entries are accompanied by such a note as "vulgar" or "pejorative" or a note indicating when and with whom to use it, but most slang words are presented with no warning notes. Al-

though the author briefly cautions in the pref- ace that some words must be used in certain contexts with discretion, he should have been more emphatic about this point as well as about the use of this dictionary for the recognition of slang in everyday speech. Otherwise, some readers might commit a sociolinguistic blunder of using vulgar or offensive slang in inappro- priate contexts.

This dictionary is relatively free from typo- graphical errors. There are, however, several editorial inconsistencies. For example, some entries lack literal meanings. The part of speech is indicated unnecessarily twice for some entries. The definitions of adjectives and adverbs are not clear; some entries are specified as adjectives, but they are actually adverbs, as is evident in the example sentences. The word porteman- teau is incorrectly used in some notes. The last section, which presents several contracted forms, could be more useful if they were presented more systematically rather than as a sim- ple list.

Despite the author's ambitious attempt, however, this reviewer still believes that a dictionary of this scope does not do much for the acquisi- tion of slang and colloquialisms. Thus, I do not envision using Beyond Polite Japanese as supple- mentary material, even in an advanced-level reading course. Nonetheless, Beyond Polite Japa- nese, like some other volumes of the Power Jap- anese Series, provides Japanese language pro- fessionals, students, and aficionados alike with fun reading about the Japanese language.

Y.-H. TOHSAKU University of California, San Diego

BARON, DENNIS. The English-Only Question. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1990. Pp. ix, 226. Paper.

Any notion that the "English-only" movement is a recent development on the American political scene will be dispelled by reading Dennis Baron's The English-Only Question. Indeed, the argument over the use of English in public life appears to be the most traditional of American debates, beginning with concern over the "non- assimilationist" Germans in the eighteenth century. Despite numerous official English laws at the state level, however, English has never been



Reviews 557

designated in the US constitution or other Fed- eral law as the "official" language of the land. The current English-only movement has sought to establish this designation with their proposed constitutional amendment, the En- glish Language Amendment. Baron's thesis is that such legislation is simply unnecessary: En- glish is the de facto if not de jure language of the US, and official-language legislation would do more harm than good in promoting language unity.

Baron traces the major arguments in the movement to legislate English over the course of three centuries on the American continent. From the earliest days, an identity was drawn between language and nation so that speaking English came to be defined as an essential qual- ity of being American (even, of being human). As chapter two records, underlying the nine- teenth-century movement toward English-only was also the belief that English was a uniquely suited vehicle for democratic thought. To be democratic, one must speak English. With this political underpinning, the battle to legislate English usage was pitched in Pennsylvania over "the German question," in Louisiana over French and Spanish, and in New Mexico over Spanish. Chapters three and four contain the case studies of language legislation in these three areas, followed by a detailed look at a more "middle of the road" language policy in Illinois. Chapter five examines the move to legislate language in school contexts in particular as these issues surfaced during the major wave of immigration in the early twentieth century when there was strong public sentiment toward "Americanizing" immigrants via English. If there is a fault in these chapters, it is the pa- tiently amassed detail and an organizational structure that seems to shift from chronological to geographical to thematic. One wishes for a clearer structure and more perspective and evaluation on the blow-by-blow presentation of events.

Of particular interest to teachers of modern foreign languages may be the historical link between the movement to legislate English and the legal position of foreign languages in the schools. At issue is the legitimacy of any language other than English in a school setting. For instance, when the 1845 "School Law" in Illinois designated English as the language of instruction in Illinois schools, a case was brought against a public school district for using public money for instruction in German. The Supreme Court case of Meyer v. Nebraska

(1923) examined the legitimacy of a state law prohibiting the teaching of any foreign lan-

guage before the eighth grade. Language use in Puerto Rico is considered

predominantly in the school context. Along with American citizenship came attempts to im- pose English as the language of instruction in the grade schools. These attempts largely failed despite repeated campaigns and Presidential dicta. However, the larger "Puerto Rican question" is not taken up in this book; in fact, in his conclusion that conditions in the US preclude the type of core monolingual minority language community that could give rise to sustained bi- lingualism, Baron effectively ignores the unique situation of Puerto Rico. One would wish a greater consideration of this complex and important issue.

The book ends with a quick look at the man- agement of plurilingualism by several countries outside the US. These studies support Baron's "marketplace" approach to language policy by illustrating that government policy has not been as effective in achieving stated goals of language unity as "natural social forces" have been (p. 199). An appendix listing the State Offi- cial-English laws and a strong bibliography complete the book.

BARBARA HOEKJE Drexel University

A Language Policy for the European Community: Prospects and Quandaries. Ed. Florian Coulmas. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991. Pp. x, 311. Cloth.

Although the frame of reference of the sixteen contributions-originally papers presented at a conference-is clearly that of the European Community, the interest of the book as a whole and of most of the individual papers is a much wider one.

In the European Community the national languages officially hold equal status as languages of the Community. Soon other national languages will be added to the set of nine that the Community has to cope with as new mem- ber-states are assumed. The papers discuss whether the time has come to develop a coordi- nated language policy and, if so, what such a language policy should look like.

