Book review: Carmen Llamas and Dominic Watt (eds), Language and Identities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. xiv + 306 pp
Abstract
Book review Carmen Llamas and Dominic Watt (eds), Language and Identities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. xiv + 306 pp SAGE Publications, Inc. 201110.1177/0957926510376133 © The Author(s) The Author(s) RobertBevan School of Welsh, Cardiff University, Wales, UK We establish local, personal identity through language, accent and dialect. For some of us in the British Isles, this regional identity is tied up with the fact that we speak another language in addition to English as our mother tongue, such as Welsh in Wales, Cornish in Cornwall, Manx in the Isle of Man, Gaelic (or Scots) in Scotland, Irish in Ireland. Language and Identities, edited by Carmen Llamas and Dominic Watt, offers a skilfully prepared statement on the connections and correlations between different levels of our linguistic behaviour and diverse facets of our identities. It is a substantial volume, with contributions from 28 distinguished international authors, most of whom belong to one of three disciplines of linguistics, anthropology and sociology. Llamas and Watt have grouped the individual contributions, nearly all of which are original, into divisions such as theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of language and identity, indi- vidual identities, group and community identities, and national and supra-local