This book raises many questions. Depending on one's disciplinary perspective, this slim volume could be seen as uneven in its coverage and, as one reviewer has commented, its intended audience is not always clear (Chen 2006). Notwithstanding, it is an important book, on two levels. Its ostensible purpose is to present a contextualizing summary of language and aging, designed to tug readers away from a monolingual, Eurocentric focus. Beneath and through its chapters runs its second stream of thought, an effort to push readers to understand that many older people, and especially those speaking more than one language, are aging out-of-place, dis-placed, cut off by new caretaking venues and other-languaged caregivers, from their own places, those sites once indexed by their language (Lamb 2000, Neilson 2003). As Arjun Appadurai comments in an interview, “Sites, in the sense of secure locations for the practices of everyday life, may have largely vanished” (Baldauf & Hoeller 1999). What we have previously assumed about adult language, and about language and aging processes, may also need to change.

The introduction and conclusion bookend three sections: chaps. 2–5 set up a context examining language with, about, from, and to aging people. These chapters use sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives, with multiple citations to the research base developed by intersections between linguistics and communications sciences, on language and aging. Chap. 6 is the pivot to what the authors call their empirical section, chaps. 7–9, which are a set of studies chosen to display the complexity of multilingual aging: African Americans, Chinese in the United States, and the North Manhattan (NY) Aging Study.

Both the introduction and the conclusion refer to Dynamic Systems theory. Chaps. 1 and 10 are presented as a frame for the larger discussion: In the former, language is presented as a dynamic system, comprised of subsystems, and it is in terms of being part of multiple systems that language-in-aging is reconsidered. The final chapter underscores how, as different aspects of the fuller system diminish, such as the opportunity to present social skills through language interaction, subsystems, such as the ability to present appropriate pragmatic cues, will diminish as well. However, this is not a monograph about the theory, so it is not discussed in detail.

Chap. 2, “Language and aging, A dynamic perspective,” emphasizes de Bot's and Makoni's infusion of a systems perspective into the language-across-the-lifespan approach, to maintain that a speaker's language will develop commensurate with the speaker's continued maintenance of environmental and cognitive resources. Chap. 3, “Language and communication with the elderly,” draws on sociolinguistics and the wide-ranging research by Giles, Coupland, Ryan and others on accommodation to examine Elderspeak, a simplified register often used with older persons, frequently with negative results since older persons often report its use as patronizing. Chap. 4 is an overview of “Language use and language skills in the healthy and pathological aging.” If connections between adult language production/comprehension and aging/dementia are new to your students, this is a nice introduction with brief but solid references; if they have a good background, they can bypass this chapter. Chap. 5, “Resources in language and aging,” draws on psycholinguistics; it is not written for students who are well read in the psycho- or neurolinguistics of language and aging, speech pathology, or communication disorders. We must remember that students in psycholinguistics are all too often unfamiliar with sociolinguistic work and the reverse is also true. Unanticipated unfamiliarity with issues of language, communication, and bilingualism or multilingualism is a common situation in elder care. For example, one might assume that nurse aides, who shoulder a great deal of the care for older patients, particularly those with dementia, are well versed in communicating with them. However, Dijkstra et al. (2002:53) note that “Nursing aides do not seem to make attempts to compensate for memory deficits of dementia residents in their conversation where they would need to do that most: providing cues and repetitions for late-stage dementia patients.” (Such repetition, which several of us advocate [Davis 2005] is not Elderspeak as referenced above.)

Chap. 6, “Multilingualism, aging and dementia,” is designed to be the “bridge” between the contextualizing chapters, which the authors see as theoretical, and the empirical ones (61). Here, the authors “argue for more attention to multiple languages in elderly people in diagnosis and treatment” (77), having made a good case for linguistic and cultural biases in some of the most widely used assessment tools identifying cognitive impairment through language performance. And it is this latter point that sets up the three empirical chapters: 7, “Bilingual aging in older African-Americans,” 8, “The effect of age and education on narrative complexity in older Chinese in the USA,” and 9, “Language in an epidemiological study: The North Manhattan Aging study in New York City.” Each chapter presents a different data-driven interpretive technique and highlights a different cultural and linguistic group. In each case, the authors review selected studies and then extend them with additional data, case studies, or interpretation. With neurocognitive assessment of African-Americans, for example, they suggest that the question of which is the best language of assessment for all the tasks is misleading. The question should be which language should be used to get a more comprehensive picture of cognitive status at a specific point in time (85). To extend studies of Chinese aging, they add a set of case studies of narratives elicited from Chinese living in New York, because narrative has been “susceptible to the effects of dementia and aphasia in ethnic minorities such as African Americans” (104). Informants could choose whether to use Cantonese or Mandarin, and several conversational partners engaged in code-switching. While no firm conclusions can be drawn, we know a little more about narrative performance in multilingual elderly, and we know also that we need to learn much more. In the third study, the authors look at “the complex effects of education on the judgments which raters make about the communicative effectiveness of the informants” (132).

I find myself returning to different claims, particularly in the empirical sections, arguing with the authors in my mind about what I think they left out or could have added, teasing out parts of their arguments and differentiating them from earlier studies. This will be a good, provocative text for students in several disciplines who are beginning to look at multiple languages across the lifespan, in multilingual contexts.