General

out via the totally state-controlled press and broadcasting, in the South intervention was more patchy. After reunification, an initial linguistic assault has given way to a semitolerance of traditionalistic and Western influences—not, pace Nguyen, a struggle between two camps of planners but one between Communist planners and an array of unplanned forces. The running down of the Turkish language reform is thoughtfully analysed by Boeschoeten: the growing influx of Westernisms and (surely a crucial phenonemon) the combination of ' foreign' and ' native' seems to bother no one except intellectuals, while the Kemalist doctrine of populism has all but failed to bring local dialects into the standard language; on the other hand, Islamic groups have not used language as a weapon and it is doubtful if they could. Meanwhile, Boeschoeten calls for study of the attitudes and practices of school teachers—a glaring gap, surely, in most work on language planning. Even in so politically charged a field as language planning, it is an editor's and publisher's duty to exclude patently misinformed or tendentious material. The chapter on the impact of Arab-Israeli negotiations on Arabic conflict terminology is riddled with anti-Israeli diatribes and political posturing, which hardly gives one any confidence in its sociolinguistic claims. Howlers abound: for ' the Jews of the world' in the late nineteenth century, Hebrew was not ' a foreign language' but, for most males, a heritage written language, indeed many were quite capable of conversing in it. For the Hebrew knowledge among Arabs today, it is far from limited (p. 419) to 'some old people who had lived and worked in Palestine before 1948', 'prisoners ... in Israeli camps' and ' specialists'—see, e.g., Amara and Spolsky, 'The diffusion and integration of Hebrew and English lexical items in the spoken Arabic of an Israeli village', Anthropological Linguistics 28, 1986, 43-54. As for the authors' claim (p. 423) that ' the underlying Jewish ideology has always been to have the land free from Arabs and Arabic', they are (not surprisingly) unable to cite any Israeli documentation to this effect; one wonders if they are even aware of the existence of an Arabic-medium school system in Israel. As every editor should, Clyne rounds off the volume by essaying a general model, of' undoing corpus planning', in which he addresses such questions as what gave rise to the undoing, what obstructed it, and how did the time dimension vary? I found his attempt at a fiveway categorization of language situations unenlightening and even confusing, and the theoretical scope of his conclusions rather limited. Most interesting are his claims concerning sources of authority: (a) not all planning is top-down, thus Turkish purification made much use of consultative processes; (b) it is often the media and schools that are most successful, e.g., Turkey, Norway; (c) language planning is often part of political democratization or radicalism, as in Ukraine and Sandanistan Nicaragua; (d) totalitarian language planning tends to be particularly puristic—for populist or racist reasons. Corrigendum: p. 481, 1. 4: (4) should read (3).