Customer Reviews

The Multilingual Apple: Languages in New York City (Contributions to the Sociology of Language)

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Both Professors Fishman (a noted sociolinguist) and Garcia (an expert in Bilingualism)have published a timely book that addresses the important, though sometimes volatile, issue of languages and dialects. These two main authors include a number of contributing articles by a variety of educators in the assorted fields of bilingual education, English as a second language, Foreign Languages, Sociolinguistics, and Applied Linguistics. The book is interspersed with useful statistical data that, while useful, need to be updated to make the overall information more current for the present century.

While the major focus of the text is on the impressive variety of languages in New York City, its sweeping documentation of these languages, leaves a lot to be said about some of the lesser known languages, particularly those of the so-called "English Caribbean." These tend to be treated routinely by contributors who possess, at best, second-hand information about these languages; and therefore are not as scholarly forthright as they could be, had they had in-depth interviews from adequate informants of these languages(e.g., Jamaican/Jamaican Creole, Guyanese,Lesser Antillean Creole,Garifuna), which are not always entirely mutually exclusive among themselves, or even with other better known and 'well-attested' European Languages, such as English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. It would also have been helpful, had the book contained some samples of the written forms of these languages; although it must be recognized, that many of these languages still do not possess a uniform written code and, unfortunately, often rely on their "standard" English written counterpart to represent (misrepresent?) their articulated oral expressions (very much to the chagrin of achieving phonological, lexical, or even semantic adequacy).But perhaps this, in all fairness, is beyond the scope of this book and the authors' intent.

Altogether, then, the book serves as a good introduction to the subject of multilingualism, and to the wealth of its representation in "The Big Apple." I recommend it as a worthy contribution to the knowledge-base about the extant languages of the Great Metropolis.

Karl C. Folkes, Ph.D.
Retired Caribbean Educator
August, 2009