This collection of eleven articles addresses in diverse ways the role of language in the construction of social, regional, national, and supranational identities. The contributions are not based on a common theoretical concept and common methodology. The approaches to the subject vary greatly, ranging from a subtle empirical sociolinguistic study embedded in the theoretical framework of variational linguistics and the theory of language maintenance and language loss, to articles exploring aspects of language policies and political science, to an anthropological contribution.

The common denominator, the bracket that encloses the contributions and justifies their being published in a volume, is the focus on linguistic identity and trans-boundary dimensions. “Beyond boundaries” refers to territorial boundaries in contemporary Europe, but also to boundaries between identities and to the construction of hybrid identities in the context of postcolonial immigration. As the editors state in their introduction, identity is interpreted as a socially constructed phenomenon, and language identities are not unidimensional, but complex and multifaceted.

Some contributions deal with the European level of linguistic identities and refer more or less implicitly to the significance of the English language for European identity construction, now and in the future. Stephen Barbour examines nationalist and internationalist discourses and language policies at the national and international level. Jenny Cheshire starts by presenting an empirical study on the spoken language of young people in three English towns who construct their regional and class identities by using specific nonstandard grammatical features, and then discusses the role of English in European youth culture. Richard Trim raises the question of whether the meaning of words in European languages is coming closer together. Paul Gubbins takes a look at language policy and linguistic identity in the European Union.

Gubbins's article is especially interesting because he examines European language policies in the context of the future EU enlargement, and the generally taboo topic of Esperanto as an international lingua franca. The author focuses on the contrast or contradiction between political declarations in favor of linguistic diversity and an egalitarian concept of language policies on the one hand, and linguistic practice on the other hand. He points out that de facto simultaneous interpretation is not provided in all languages in an increasing number of sessions of the European Parliament, and that many languages are excluded from specific areas of EU activity. Gubbins then outlines the “Radical Approach,” a working document by a member of the Italian Radical Party, Gianfranco Dell'Alba, that examines various methods of international communication and proposes two possible solutions based on the idea of a common language: selection of a single working language from the official languages of the EU (Spanish is suggested); or adoption of a “neutral” language such as Esperanto. The author presents the arguments put forward in the debates on Dell'Alba's working paper in the European Parliament's Committee for Institutional Affairs (1998), which show that the Esperanto option was not taken seriously, although, according to statistics cited by Gibson, 20% of the MEPs favor Esperanto. He demands further research to identify the reasons why MEPs support Esperanto. In his view, the players responsible for shaping and formulating the new Europe of the next century “prefer to adopt an attitude of wait-and-see” (p. 57).

Other contributions have a more specific approach to “language-politics-identity,” for example those by Brendan Murphy, Cristina Diaz-Varela, and Salvatore Coluccello about regionalism in Catalonia and northern Italy or “Padania.” In “Cultural memory, language and symbolic Russianness,” Harald Haarmann analyzes the historical development of traditional stereotypes and concepts like “Mother Russia” and “the Russian soul.” Although these concepts were repressed for decades under the Soviet regime, they are still important. In the process of establishing a cultural identity for the post-Soviet era, Haarmann even observes a renaissance of these concepts in all spheres of public and private life. The revival of traditional “Russianness” is interpreted as a reaction to the present chaos and crisis, and to the lack of solidarity, social stability, cultural orientation, and political orientation. The author also analyzes the far-reaching effects on the status and structures of the Russian language produced by radical socio-political changes in the 1990s, when its role as a “pan-union language” changed into that of a state language, and more than 20 million people of Russian descent found themselves living outside Russia as minorities. However, in earlier times the concept of “Mother Russia” was manipulated as a vehicle for assimilating non-Russians. As far as the construction of a future identity of modern Russia is concerned, Haarmann believes that the country must find “reliable strategies of multicultural cooperation to render Mother Russia attractive for non-Russians on her soil” (p. 71).

Su Wright's very interesting contribution addresses the topic from a historical perspective and highlights linguistic identity changes by describing the language shift from Italian to French in Nice after the city became part of France in 1860. She discusses the different factors that caused French to replace Italian as the official language and that led to the disappearance of the local Italian dialect, Nissart, from the private domain. The factors she mentions are economic ones, such as the attractiveness of French traditions to the intelligentsia of Nice, the fact that French was the lingua franca of tourists, and the fact that the Italian-speaking administrative class left Nice and was replaced by French-speaking newcomers. Last but not least was the impact of the vigorous French nation-building in the Third Republic, in which linguistic unification promoted by compulsory education and compulsory military service played a crucial role. Nice became a French town within a few decades because of the linguistic dilution caused by the French-speaking newcomers and the decision of individuals to adopt French as the language of the nation-state and as a language that guaranteed social mobility, commercial advantages, and prestige.

Mike Holt's contribution goes beyond the boundaries of Europe to deal with linguistics and colonialism, focusing on the current and past role of the French language in Algeria and the conflict over the relations among French, Arabic, and other indigenous languages. He examines the roots of the conflict and the shifts in the balance of power among the languages involved. Because neither French nor standard Arabic is, strictly speaking, indigenous to Algeria, they draw on universalism to justify their role and their right to represent Algerian identity. Although education has been arabized under the influence of Arabic nationalism, French is still the language of personal advancement. But in Algeria, as in other non-European countries, European concepts of linguistic and political universality are no longer accepted as the uncontested model of human progress. Holt assumes that standard Arabic will “carry the banner of Algerian identity for the foreseeable future” (p. 109) despite the fact that it has no specifically Algerian pedigree.

Michael Anderson brings the identity debate from the international to the domestic level and offers insight from a social-anthropological perspective into cultural boundaries of bilingual Greek/British households. Finally, the last two contributions offer two different perspectives on minority language use in Britain. Lerleen Willis summarizes the findings of an empirical study on Creole/English bilingualism in the African-Caribbean community, and Mike Reynolds describes an empirical study about bilingualism in the Punjabi/Urdu community in Sheffield, hypothesizing linkages among social network membership, code-switching behaviors, and language maintenance/shift. In this subtle study, a list of the abbreviations used in the text would have been very useful, especially since the confusion of two tables renders understanding more difficult (Figure 11.2, p. 152, and Figure 11.3, p. 153).

This publication contains contributions based on very different theoretical and conceptual frameworks, which sometimes allow surprising and unusual approaches to the topics, such as Michael Anderson's view of the child in bilingual families as a “boundary,” “a field for competing adult identities” (114), and a “battlefield” (p. 116). In my opinion, this diversity is an advantage rather than a disadvantage of the book, although the theoretical and methodical foundation could have been developed more explicitly in some articles. Furthermore, some readers might expect the book to focus more on the role of language(s) in the discursive construction of a future European identity, and to discuss more explicitly topics such as the lingua franca model of European communication, the principles and contradictions of EU language policies, and the frequently discussed “cost of multilingualism” in the EU, as the subtitle suggests. Nevertheless, this volume covers a wide range of aspects and of attitudes to the field of tension between “language and identity” referred to in the subtitle, and thus it presents a mosaic of contributions that are, on the whole, worth reading and of interest to sociolinguists, discourse researchers, and political scientists.