Language in Society 38 :1 (2009)
108
JANE H. HILL
Language in Society 38 (2009). Printed in the United States of America
doi:10.1017/S004740450809009X
Joseph Errington , Linguistics in a colonial world: A story of language, meaning,
and power . Malden, MA, Oxford, and Carleton, Victoria : Blackwell , 2008 .
Pp. x, 199 . Pb $37.95.
Reviewed by Jane H. Hill
Anthropology, University of Arizona
Tucson, Arizona 85721, USA
jhill@email.arizona.edu
Linguistics in a colonial world is a compact, clear, and helpful introduction to a
growing body of “critical” literature on the history of linguistics. The book con-
tributes both reviews of recent work and original scholarship by Errington him-
self. Special emphasis throughout the seven chapters is placed on the varied
dimensions and implications of the “reduction to writing” (Errington considers
the metaphor of “reduction” to be particularly apt), but many other themes appear
as well, including theories of language relationships, both genetic and typologi-
cal, and their implications, ideologies of the relationships between “languages”
and “peoples,” and the political impacts of contemporary encounters between in-
digenous communities and well-meaning documentary linguists.
I sometimes feel that “critical” approaches throw the scientifi c baby out with the
Foucauldian bathwater, but Errington does not fail to remind us, in chapter 1, “The
linguistic in the colonial,” that linguists of all eras have contributed to our knowl-
edge and can be read with profi t in “empirical” as well as “critical” perspective.
Errington summarizes the latter perspective, that of his own text, as grounded in the
understanding that linguistics in all eras can make “languages objects of knowledge,
so that their speakers could be made subjects of power” (p. 3). The chapter is ex-
ceptionally clear on what is lost in linguistic accounts of language, when the
extraordinary complexity of human interaction is “reduced” to representation in
writing; this poi