Arabic

held together by a strong sense of group solidarity, show "surprisingly strong resistance against the more powerful standard dialects" (p. 213). Burridge skillfully demonstrates how Pennsylvania German has long provided an important barrier to the outside world, allowing both insider identification and perhaps more importantly, separation from the outside. Building on Nancy Dorian's insights, Burridge concludes that linguistic survival is directly linked to the absence of purist attitudes toward spoken language: Structural compromise is a sign of health which enhances the chances of a language's survival (p. 219). Language maintenance among the Hmong ex-refugee communities is addressed by Christina Eira, who demonstrates that the "Hmong language in the west is undergoing a concentrated standardisation effort which is not paralleled in Asia" (p. 235). This standardization is fuelled in part by the need for the language to be deployed in modern communication and publication technologies, in turn resulting in a number of lexical extensions and neologisms. Chapters 18 and 19 focus on the socio-political aspects of language endangerment. Nicholas Thieberger addresses identity formation, in particular the reification and interpretation of language as an identity marker. He demonstrates that in their efforts at reviving a language, Aboriginal people may instead be recreating it (p. 321). In this sense, Aboriginal languages are increasingly valued as a link with "an idealised harmonious past" (p. 314) rather than as a primary medium of communication. The coauthors of chapter 19 are prudent to point out the tension between language documentation and language maintenance projects (p. 329). While the term "preservation" is often summoned to counteract the negative influence of "language endangerment," the use of this turn of phrase requires further unpacking to be analytically useful. Many who invoke these terms are not sufficiently mindful of the difference which exists between "preserving a language for science in the future by documenting it, and preserving it for the speakers as a living language by helping them maintain it" (p. 329). This distinction is returned to by the editors, who conclude their useful and timely volume with a much-needed critique of "hit and run fieldwork," in which linguists "collect the data, get out, publish with academic publishers in a first-world language, get an academic job and leave the speakers of 'their' EL [endangered language] to their own devices" (p. 351). In all, this book is a very readable and well-produced hardback for a student audience interested in language endangerment.

Recent extreme events such as the devastating 2003 European summer heat wave raise important questions about the possible causes of any underlying trends, or low-frequency variations, in regional climates. Here, we present new evidence that basin-scale changes in the Atlantic Ocean, probably related to the thermohaline circulation, have been an important driver of multidecadal variations in the summertime climate of both North America and western Europe. Our findings advance understanding of past climate changes and also have implications for decadal climate predictions.

This study examines interference as it occurs in the speech of a 12-year-old bilingual child whose languages are Arabie and English. The subject spoke only Arabie bef ore his arrivai in the United States at the age of 8. The analysis of his speech shows interference on the syntactic and the lexicallevels of the child's native language. The analysis of the child's speech also shows that performance, with its apparent interference, is not a reflection of the bilingual's competence in Arabie. Performance, which is rarely a total manifestation of competence, presents different aspects of interference according to which the speaker can be classified as a native or nonnative speaker of a language. These aspects and their amount are examined, and performance is used as data to be investigated in order to determine the subject's level of competence. Data were recorded for the subject under study over a period of six months. The material consists of systematized as well as spontaneous recorded speeches, both of which measure the impact of one Iinguistic system on the other concerning the quality and quantity of the subject's knowledge of Arabie. This article demonstrates that the passive knowledge of the bilingual child is greater than his active knowledge. This finding supports the view that bilingualism is more than a study of the speaker's performance. An analysis of the speaker's level of competence and performance would give a complete picture of the bilingual's consciousness of his language.

As an Arab American and a linguist, I have been interested in the spoken language used by Arab Americans in Detroit for some time. Detroit is a unique laboratory for the study of Arabic as an ethnic minority language because the Detroit metropolitan area has the largest concentration of Arabs outside the Arab world. Their number has been estimated at between 260,000 to 350,000 in the southeastern part of Michigan, which consists of Wayne, Macomb, and Oakland counties. The sociolinguistic approach of this paper examines the ways in which language contact and conflict situations explain changes that have occurred in the Arabic spoken by first-, second-, and third-generation Arab Americans. Arab immigration to the US and to Michigan specifically, began in the nineteenth century. The majority of immigrants came from what was then called Greater Syria. They were mostly unskilled males and, for the most part, Christians. The second wave of immigration occurred after World War II. Among these new immigrants were Muslims from Lebanon, Palestine, and Yemen, as well as Christian Iraqis, mostly Chaldeans (Abraham & Abraham 1981:18). In the 1950s and '60s, a third wave of Arab immigration landed in the US; many of these new residents were students and professionals. They were Egyptians, Iraqis, Lebanese, Palestinians, and Syrians (Elkholy 1966). A fourth wave of immigrants consisting mostly of Lebanese and Palestinians occurred in the 1970s and '80s, owing to the war in Lebanon, and the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Finally, in the 1990s, a fifth wave came to the US consisting of Palestinians, Lebanese, Egyptians, and Iraqi Muslims. According to the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), from 1988 to 1990, approximately 60,000 Arabs took up residence in the Detroit area. At first, the early comers came into the Dearborn area, which is located southwest of Detroit. Like any group of immigrants who first come to the US, Arab Americans upon their arrival congregated in a neighborhood where they