Book Review: JOHN GIBBONS AND ELIZABETH RAMIREZ. Maintaining a minority language. A case study of hispanic teenagers. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2004. Pp. x, 240. Hb $129.95, Pb $46.95.

Abstract

Gibbons and Ramirez’ book discusses the complex inter-relatedness of the many social, political, and personal factors involved with minority language maintenance in the heavily monolingual environment of Sydney, Australia. While acknowledging the ‘predatory’ effects world-Englishes have on minority languages (Hornberger, 1997) and the often debilitating effects Australian language policies have had on a multitude of its minority languages (Bullivant, 1995; Gibbons, 1995), this book ‘weights’ (to borrow the authors’ metaphor) the scale positively for one minority language community. This nuanced depiction of a Spanish-speaking community, the practices, attitudes and beliefs within which facilitate maintenance of their language provide a solid contribution to the literature on bilingualism. The book can be divided into two major sections: first, their research articulates the linguistic complexities involved in achieving and maintaining a high level of bilingual proficiency; second, Gibbons and Ramirez explore a vast array of mitigating factors that contribute to the maintenance of a minority language. Although the many quantitative tables can at times be daunting for some, they are consistently balanced by, and reinforced with, illustrative qualitative data from their teenage informants. This book’s first chapter highlights the difficulties in linguistic and cultural maintenance for minority languages, contextualizes their study within the larger field of bilingualism and language proficiency, language policy and locates itself amid Sydney’s Spanish-speaking community. Importantly, as the majority of Spanish-speaking Australians have immigrated from Chile, they contrast both sets of Australian findings with Chilean-based research of a similar demographic, contextualizing their findings nicely in the aspects of a global language other than English. The data from subsequent chapters is taken from relatively recent (19971998) interviews and closed questionnaires from 106 teenage informants.