Listening to WhitenessWhite Kids: Language, Race, and Styles of Youth Identity. By Mary Bucholtz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Abstract

Since the late 1990s, Mary Bucholtz has been a leading analyst of linguistic styling, gender, and race and their place in American youth identity construction. She has a terrific ear for the telling details of young people’s talk. Bucholtz has now brought together the many threads of her influential work in a much-anticipated monograph based on her ethnographic research in a multiracial Northern California high school, pseudonymously dubbed Bay City High School (BCHS), in the mid-1990s. White Kids examines how European American youth used the tools of language to construct a range of identities in a school that was experiencing racial turmoil. Bucholtz argues that these multiple styles of whiteness are all founded on calibrations of alignment with black and white youth cultures. She examines three emblematic local white styles: preppy mainstream, white hip-hop fans, and nerds. The analysis relies centrally on recorded interviews of 26 white students, along with maps of the schoolyard that she asked them to draw, a rewarding technique. Contextualizing the interviews in ethnographic observation, Bucholtz analyzes extracts from the transcripts in fine-grained interactional detail to unpack the identities and social worlds that these students negotiate. Limited quantitative analysis of a set of sociolinguistic variables rounds out the study. A central goal of the book is to demonstrate that the conceptual and methodological tools of sociocultural linguistics can enrich the study of identity across all the disciplines, showing in detail how language serves ongoing identity projects and is implicated in larger sociopolitical structures (p. 3). The book is intended to reach readers well beyond linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics, and the presentation is well geared for such a broad audience. Bucholtz focuses on different features of linguistic display for each of the three white styles. The preppy, or “popular,” group appears to arbitrate white students’ exclusive social