Stephen J. Caldas, Raising bilingual-biliterate children in monolingual cultures. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2006. Pp. xvi, 231. Pb. $39.95.

This is the fascinating story of the author's own family project of raising his three children French-English bilingually in English-speaking Louisiana. Caldas, a French-English bilingual himself, and his bilingual French-Canadian wife artificially orchestrate and manipulate the children's environments from birth to adolescence to ensure that the children develop full bilingual proficiency and biliteracy in French and English. Caldas's and his wife's main strategy is to speak only French to their son and their identical twin daughters. They also commit to use only French with each other, thus creating an all-French-speaking home environment. The Caldases also enroll the children in French immersion school and make extensive use of French-language media to further expose the children to French. Finally, the author and his wife purchase a cottage in Quebec where they spend the summers, providing the children with authentic societal language immersion. The outcome of this extraordinary experiment is that, by adolescence, all three children are completely bilingual and biliterate in French and English and can be easily mistaken as native speakers of both Quebecois French and American English.

Peter Garrett, Nikolas Coupland & Angie Williams, Investigating language attitudes: Social meanings of dialect, ethnicity and performance. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003. x + 251 pp. Hb $79.95.

As its title suggests, this book focuses on attitudes to language and dialect production, perception, and use, and particularly on attitudes to language variation, dialect, speech style, language preference, and minority languages as well as their speakers. As we know, an important aspect of the complex social psychology of speech communities is the arbitrary and subjective intellectual and emotional response of a society's members to the languages and varieties in their social environment: Different language varieties are often associated with deep-rooted emotional responses – social attitudes, in short – such as thoughts, feelings, stereotypes, and prejudices about people, about social, ethnic and religious groups, and about political entities. These emotional responses and perceptions of language and dialect phenomena are biased by cultural, social, political, economic, or historical facts or other circumstances within the speech community. Sociolinguistically based research may build a more complete and accurate picture of the speaker's linguistic behavior, in the context of its complex social psychology, as well as of the regard for language use within the community, and may further understanding of the dynamics of speech communities as well as of the subjective life of language varieties.

While Bakhtin's (1981) notions of voicing, double voicing, and ventriloquation have been applied extensively in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, only a few scholars have engaged with his related notion of parody. This article examines how a Sardinian manager uses parody in an oral narrative to construct and contest moralities surrounding personal and corporate identities. Through an analysis of both the story and the storytelling event, I show how this manager uses parody to better align himself with the ideals of his company and to frame his relationships with his employers and with the market more generally. In particular, my analysis focuses on how managers discursively create moral hierarchies of value that become key resources for understanding their stance in relation to the competitive dynamics of their industries. Parody in storytelling thus proves to be a crucial analytical tool for understanding brand and branding strategies. (Parody, narrative, brand, Italy, discourse analysis)*