Finnish sociolinguistics has a proud tradition of address research, in Germanic as well as in Romance languages. In this tradition, studies on address usage in fictional genres such as narrative literature, drama and film have complemented empirical research by questionnaire. Thanks to a three-year university grant (2005–07), the Department of Romance Languages of the University of Helsinki has been able to bundle these traditional strengths and approaches. The result is a collection of studies published by the Neophilological Society of Helsinki, which provides an overview of this undertaking.
While the volume contains chapters on Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese, all written in the corresponding language, the scope of research is different for all four. French and Italian are the object of three dedicated chapters each, covering questionnaire-based research as well as studies on address in fictional literature and films. Spanish is covered by a chapter based on questionnaires and another one on literary texts, while Portuguese, the topic of a single questionnaire-based chapter, appears to have been included as somewhat of an afterthought. Of the four languages covered by the survey, Portuguese is also the only one not used in the volume's trilingual title.
All chapters contain a plethora of interesting details that I can't do justice to in the framework of a short review. I will therefore limit myself to some sort of critical conspectus. All questionnaire-based studies (except for the one on Portuguese) used two sets of questionnaires, one for secondary school students and one for adult respondents; they were distributed in several research locations in the respective countries. The Italian study used the largest number of research locations (eight), which makes a lot of sense in a country with such a diverse picture of dialects and regional standards. Regrettably, though, albeit probably wisely, the Italian study restricts itself to the north and the centre of the country, avoiding the southern strongholds of V address forms such as voi, vossia etc.
Paradoxically, it is the very individual character of the different chapters that makes their results difficult to compare. All questionnaires were based on the ones developed for French, but of course they had to be adapted rather than just translated for use in Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. While a restriction to pronominal address and to the binary T/V distinction of tu and vous might make methodological sense for French, it appears less obvious for Spanish, where the boundaries between pronominal and nominal address are more blurred than in French. The Italian questionnaire, at least, takes account of possible voi address in addition to the tu/lei alternative, and the Portuguese one sensibly offers a quaternary opposition of tu, você, o senhor/a senhora and title address. Similarly, the individual chapters on address in fictional literature and film are each very interesting, but as a set they are difficult to compare, because they do not deal with completely comparable genres of novels or films in the respective languages.
A substantial concluding chapter would have been not only welcome, but also appropriate, all the more so since four languages are used in this publication – only the old school Romance philologist of European extraction would be expected to have reading competence in all four – and the necessary methodological differences in the individual chapters remain underemphasized. That the volume doesn't really offer such a chapter is regrettable, as is the lack of a subject index.
Another slight disappointment is the list of references, which is not really up to date; apart from a few more recent titles, it seems to reflect the state of the art at the time (ca. 2007) the university grant was exhausted. In addition, relevant Anglophone research seems to have been relatively neglected. Not only are articles such as Warren (Reference Warren, Peeters and Ramière2009) or Parkinson and Hajek (Reference Parkinson and Hajek2004) missing from the list, but so is a monograph that has proven as momentous for address research as Clyne, Norrby and Warren (Reference Clyne, Norrby and Warren2009).
Apart from the criticisms above, the individual chapters in the volume provide valuable contributions to sociolinguistics and deserve wide distribution and an attentive audience.
