Kurt Braunmüller and Christoph Gabriel (Eds.). 2012. Multilingual Individuals and Multilingual Societies. Amsterdam–Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ISBN 978-90-272-1933-6 (Hb). ISBN 978-90-272-7349-9 (Eb). (Humburg Studies on Multilingualism, ISSN 1571-4934; v.13) 474 pages The volume’s number is 13 in John Benjamin’s reputable series Hamburg Studies on Multilingualism. Defying superstition, the book with its Editors’ Foreword, 25 chapters, name and subject indexes is a commendable enterprise. This excellent publication presents a stimulating panorama of research carried out by the Collaborative Research Center on “Multilingualism.” The three main areas of investigation: (1) the acquisition of multilingualism, (2) historical as- pects of multilinguals and variance, and (3) multilingual communications, are among the main foci of contemporary research on multilingualism. At present, the term multilingualism is a buzzword. A deluge of books, articles, and projects have appeared, and along with positive aspects of this long awaited change, sometimes the word multilingualism is used as an attrac- tion in a book or article title, unsupported by the contents. Unlike those, this volume is really about multilingualism and its treatment of various linguistic phenomena goes beyond the monolingual paradigm. Part One, “How Language Is Acquired and Lost in Multilingual Settings: First and Second Language Acquisition, Foreign Language Learning and Language Attrition” deals with the vast variety of linguistic phenomena, such as morphology, syntax, morphosyntax, segmental phonology, and discourse Theory and Practice of Second Language Acquisition vol. 3 (2) 2017, pp. 113–120 Larissa Aronin114 production. It also covers the subfields of foreign language learning, and second and third language acquisition (SLA and TLA), involving a range of languages. Manuela Schönenberger, Monika Rothweiler, and Franziska Sterner open the volume by reporting on their study on successive bilingual children in the chapter entitled “Case Marking in Child L1 and Early Child L2 German.” Based on spontaneous production data from bilingual L1 Turkish children, and experimental data from monolingual and bilingual children with Turkish, Polish or Russian as their L1, and German as L2 for all of them, the authors examined the early L2 acquisition with regard to whether it resembles L1 acquisition, or shows similarities to adult L2 acquisition in the domain of grammar. Susanne E. Carroll, in her “First Exposure Learners Make Use of Top-Down Lexical Knowledge When Learning Words” breaks good news for learners and teachers, as she emphasizes the importance of the first exposure to a target language. She argues that even minimum exposure to continuous speech may result in rapid learning, even when target words contain novel L2 sounds. This study suggests a more nuanced approach and presents a refreshing well-based counter-weight to balance traditional discussions of frequency effects. The contribution highlights the rapid rate at which sound forms are created and mapped to referents, and is convincing in regard to the powerful role of L1 lexical knowledge on L3 word learning. The three next chapters of this section expand evidence on early bilingual acquisition. “The Emergence of a New Variety of Russian in a Language Contact Situation: The Case of a Russian Swedish Bilingual Child,” by Natasha Ringblom adds new shades of meaning to our knowledge of bilingual child development. The multilingual, rather than monolingual point of departure in such an investigation would seem to be more effective. In “The Acquisition of Gender Agreement Marking in Polish: A Study of Bilingual Polish-German-Speaking Children,” by Bernhard Brehmer and Monika Rothweiler describe the development of gender marking in a group of simultaneous, or successive bilingual children from age 2:11 to 6:5, growing up in Germany. It was found that unlike monolingual children, for bilingual Polish-German children, the acquisition of gender assignment and gender agree- ment in Polish is not accomplished in early childhood. Natalia Gagarina examines “Discourse Cohesion in the Elicited Narratives of Early Russian-German Sequential Bilinguals.” Comparing the narrations of bilingual children with monolingual Russian-speaking children and adults, allowed the author to expand the evidence on bilingual advantage over mono- linguals. In particular, bilinguals of all age groups produce longer utterances and use more word tokens per story, in comparison to monolinguals due to the greater sensitivity of bilinguals in establishing cohesive ties in discourse. Nelleke Strik in “Wh-questions in Dutch: Bilingual and Trilingual Acquisition Compared,” compares bilingual and trilingual acquisition of Dutch- Kurt Braunmüller and Christoph Gabriel… 115 French, and Dutch-French-Italian, in five and seven year-old bilingual and trilingual children. Monolingual children and adult learners were control par- ticipants in elicited production tasks, thus increasing the scope and reliability of the study. The data from this study generally point to qualitative differences of multilingual development, as compared to monolingual development. With that, among the findings is the fact that the production of qualitatively differ- ent structures is restricted, and that the age of the learners reflects on their use of inversion. The author accounts for this data with the help of a theory of transfer based on derivational complexity. The contribution by Alexandra Żaba and Conxita Lleó, “German Segments in the Speech of German-Spanish Bilingual Children,” presents new data on early bilingual acquisition of consonants and discusses the possibility of the delay linked with particular vowels and consonants. The authors state that the dissimilarity in production of segments in L1 as compared to monolinguals, and consonants involved in German voicing contrast, contribute to a delay in the bilinguals’ target-like acquisition of sounds, whereas vowels normally do not. Cristina Pierantozzi offers the contribution on “Agreement within Early Mixed DP: What Mixed Agreement Can Tell Us about the Bilingual Language Faculty.” In their chapter, “Gender Marking in L2 Learners and Italian-German Bilinguals with German as the Weaker Language,” Antje Stöhr, Deniz Akpinar, Giulia Bianchi, and Tania Kupish consider the mastery of grammatical gender by adult simultaneous bilingual speakers, and highly proficient L2 learners. Exploring the knowledge of gender assignment and agreement, and the impli- cations of differences in this area between users and learners is productive. “A Bidirectional Study of Object Omissions in French-English Bilinguals,” by Michaela Pirvulescu, Ana T. Pérez-Leroux, and Yves Roberge contributes to the debate on the effects of bilingualism. By focusing on object omissions, the authors argue that at least in the domain of null-object possibilities, bilin- guals experience delay, as compared to monolinguals, in the rate of production. With that, the authors indicate that development of bilinguals and monolinguals is comparable, and attribute the effects in the rates of omission they found, to the retention of the default null object representation, and to the nature of bilingual input. French is learnt more efficiently as an L3 than as an L2, in the settings of Swiss primary schools, because students who previously learnt a foreign lan- guage can use their skills in English as a resource when learning French. This very important, clear, and convincing case is argued by Andrea Haenni Hoti and Sybille Neinzmann in the chapter “Foreign Language Reforms in Swiss Primary Schools: Potentials and Limitations.” The authors describe the study which they carried out comparing the two models of foreign language teach- ing, and the competencies of the children from both programs in the French Larissa Aronin116 language. The authors based their research on the tenets of third language acquisition (TLA). They also found that one year later the initial advantage of the more experienced learners had disappeared. This, and other far-reaching implications of the study are significant, both for theoretical understanding of multilingualism, and for its practical implementation in education. The section is concluded by the chapter: “ ‘Multilingual Brains’: Individual Differences in Multilinguals—A Neuro-Psycholinguistic Perspective.” Julia Festman reports on two research projects representing two lines of research— one, comparing early and late trilinguals on a sentence processing task using f MRI, and the other, which deals with bilinguals who were found to be different in how they switch unintentionally between their two languages. The second line of research carried out by Festman distinguishes two groups of bilinguals termed “switcher” bilinguals, and “non-switcher” bilinguals, in accordance with their behavior when switching the languages. Festman indicates that there might be a relationship between switching behavior and control abilities. In terms of the executive control, “what distinguished both groups most is their in/ability to prevent errors of cross-language interference in monolingual settings, that is, when a specific target language is required” (p. 213). As for the neuro-linguistic line of investigation of the multilingual brain, the author discusses a number of significant studies in that domain and presents the work of Elise Wattendorf and her colleagues. Comparisons between early (before age 6) and late (after age 6) multilinguals among other things, suggest that early bilingualism leads to structural plasticity, and reveal that the “early bilingual brain differs from the late bilingual brain during sentence production, but not during language perception tasks.” Along with that, the chapter provides a well-focused overview of the most recent research on multilingualism, with a focus on individual differences and the brain. The chapter is, in fact a state-of-the art overview of contemporary neuro- psycholinguistic research on multilingualism, not just bilingualism, and ac- knowledges “the strong impact the knowledge of a third language has on language processing” (p. 209). The ten articles of Part Two “How Language Changes in Multilingual Settings: Contact-Induced Language Variation and Change,” convey a broad range of issues on variation and changes in morphology, phonology, structure of language varieties in contact, using the data from old languages such as Old Swedish, Middle High German, and Medieval Latin, and contemporary lan- guage varieties: Faroese, Danish, Occitan, French, Italian, Spanish and Polish, to name only some. This section also includes the chapter by Svenja Kranish, Juliane House, and Viktor Becher in which “Changing Conventions in English- German Translations of Popular Scientific Texts” are discussed at length. Kurt Braunmüller and Christoph Gabriel… 117 I found the next two studies especially absorbing and solid. Martin Elsig in “Subject-Verb Inversion in 13th-Century German and French: A Comparative View” offers meticulous systematic comparison and analysis of the data ex- tracted from Old French and Middle High German, aimed at defining whether the sources of the inversion in Old French and Middle High German are the same, or different. The author defies the plausible-sounding assumptions, and arrives at the conclusion that by the mid-thirteenth century, the speakers of Old French and of Middle High German drew on different grammars for subject inversion. In the abstract of his contribution “Multilingual Constructions: A Dia- systematic Approach to Common Structures,” Steffen Höder argues that mul- tilingual perspective on language contact phenomena is more adequate, than referring to the effect of such phenomena on the monolingual systems. Taking this as a point of departure, and extending the concept of diasystematicity to languages and multilingualism, the author postulates that in situations of stable and intense language contact, a “pro-diasystematic” change takes place. This means, according to the author, that interlingual correspondence is regulated in such a way that the higher proportion of common structures, and a lesser proportion of idiosyncrasies is found between two contacting languages. The common system is simplified to the effect that it loses its languages’ specific restrictions, and becomes productive in the other language as well. Caroline Heycock and Hjalmar P. Petersen provide a comprehensive descrip- tion, thorough analysis, and insightful observations on a rich system of mod- ern Faroese pseudo-coordinations, in comparison with the same phenomenon in Mainland Scandinavian languages. Csilla-Anna Szabó and then Bernhard Brehmer and Agnieszka Czachór continue investigation into the structure of contacting languages, one of which is German. The first of them, is the case of two unrelated languages, in the chapter “Toward a Fused Lect: Mixed German- Hungarian Concessive Conditionals in a German Dialect in Romania.” On the basis of detailed examination of linguistic material from the multilingual speech community in Romania, Szabó reports on the strong structural similarities and lexical material from Hungarian, in the German dialect of this community, which the author, following Auer’s typology (1998), believes to be the process of emerging a new bilingual grammar of a fused lect. The second contribution dealing with the aspects of structure is: “The Formation and Distribution of the Analytic Future Tense in Polish-German Bilinguals.” Brehmer and Czachór investigated how German patterns are involved in the formation of the analytic future tense in the Polish used by its young speakers in Germany. The findings have implications for the issue of language attrition. The three following contributions, each very good in its own right, cel- ebrate the tenacity of “small” varieties, in contact with bigger languages and reveal the complex dynamism of multilingual reality. This cluster of chap- Larissa Aronin118 ters deals with phonological systems of languages in contact. In “Perception and Interpretation of Intonational Prominence in Varieties of South African English,” Sabine Zerbian examines prosodic differences in varieties of the same language, English, against the multilingual background of South Africa. The author addresses the perception of intonation and the interpretation of focus marking through prosodic means, by the listeners who are speakers of contact languages of the Bantu group, unrelated to English. The propitious research de- sign allowed the researcher to discover significant differences in perceptions of intonational differences between Black South African English on the one hand, and other varieties of South African English on the other hand, and to come up with a number of other findings. This well-written paper also introduces readers to the realm of African multilingualism, the nature and manifestations of which are considerably different from the European multilingualism, for example (Brann, 1991; Anchimbe, 2007). “The Prosody of Occitan-French Bilinguals” by Raféu Sichel-Bazin, Carolin Buthke, and Trudel Meisenburg captivates by its measured narration and com- prehensive methodology. The reader sees in detail the nuances of how, and in which aspects, the varieties drawing on Latin, French, and Occitan, developed each in their own way, and how, being close territorially, they mutually influ- ence each other, again, in different ways in certain aspects. “Diachronic Prosody of a Contact Variety: Analyzing Porteño Spanish Spontaneous Speech” by Andrea Peškova, Ingo Feldhausen, Elena Kireva, and Christoph Gabriel continues investigation into Romance historical linguistics in another place and time. The authors take us to Buenos Aires where the Spanish variety of Porteño is spoken, allegedly influenced by massive Italian immigra- tion between 1830 and 1950. The authors meticulously trace and consider the historical and linguistic causes of the changes and the persistence of Porteño Spanish. Their study is also notable for its methodological rigor, and in that, dissimilar to other diachronic studies of prosody, the researchers employed recordings for their comparison. Ariadna Benet, Susana Cortés, and Conxita Lleó illuminate “Devoicing of Sibilants as a Segmental Cue to the Influence of Spanish onto Current Catalan Phonology.” The study can be said to belong to the diverse areas of phonology and sociolinguistics; and its findings are relevant to educators and linguists alike. The different results on vowel and voiced sibilant production in Catalan obtained in two areas of Barcelona indicate that a phonological change in the situation of language contact can be caused by a combination of internal and external linguistic factors. Part Three, “How Language is Used in Multilingual Settings: Linguistic Practices and Policies,” contains three contributions of good quality dealing with the reality of multilingual practices and the challenges faced by the par- ticipants of these particular multilingual settings. Kurt Braunmüller and Christoph Gabriel… 119 In “Explaining the Interpreter’s Unease: Conflicts and Contradictions in Bilingual Communication in Clinical Settings,” Kristin Bührig, Ortrun Klishe, Bernd Meyer, and Birte Pawlack elegantly single out and define the elusive, and therefore unresolved problems in medical translation. They also formulate the problem within the theoretical framework and present it as a practical task to be dealt with. The approach is to offer classes for nurses who frequently have to undertake the job of translation, taking into consideration, and building course content that would resolve around the issues identified by nurses themselves. The domain of healthcare is increasingly aware of the acute need for bilingual and multilingual services (see, e.g., Georgiou, 2013). Measuring in multilingualism has always been a challenging enterprise. The more praise- worthy is the successful attempt of evaluating speech accommodation between pharmacists and patients. To my mind, the study by Myfyr Prys, Margaret Deuchar, and Gwerfyl Roberts, “Measuring Bilingual Accommodation in Welsh Rural Pharmacies” is exemplary, creative, innovative, and very practi- cally minded. It turns out that speech accommodation is widespread within bilingual clinical encounters. No doubt, then, that measuring it and might lead to greater opportunities to improve communications skills of medical professionals. To this end, the authors have developed a formula with the help of which they suggest calculating the relative proportion of Welsh and English words, and determine “how much the speaker changes his proportion of Welsh versus English words over time in relation to the proportion being used by the interlocutor” (p. 419). The volume concludes by the chapter “Becoming Bilingual in a Multilingual Context: A Snapshot View of L2 Competences in South Tyrol” written by Chiara Vettory, Katrin Wisnievski, and Andrea Abel. Using the data of an extensive linguistic and psychosocial survey, the authors collected information on the competences of South Tyrolean schoolchildren in their L2—Italian for the German speakers and German for Italian speakers and revealed salient differences. Competence is not exclusively language related as extra-linguistic factors exert notable influence, too. Among the findings is that “school type appears to be the strongest predictor of L2 proficiency” (p. 451) in these par- ticular sociolinguistic settings. Apart from supplying data of special interest to the local reality of South Tyrolean bilingualism, the findings provide additional evidence and food for thought to educational research in multilingual settings. To conclude, the contributions are all different in numerous ways, but to- gether they constitute a comprehensive picture of multilingual individuals and multilingual societies. A variety of diverse kinds of multilingualism are treated here, manifesting the super-diversity of multilingualism, both from diachronic and synchronic perspectives. Other beneficial characteristics of this serious and important volume on multilingualism research are that a number of contribu- tions, in the best traditions of science, while treating traditional assumptions Larissa Aronin120 in the field with knowledge and care, justifiably dare to defy them if they feel it necessary and come up with novel ideas and insights. One could wish, perhaps, that the abbreviations of the key terms (e.g., “DP” on p. 137) commonly used in specific linguistic disciplines, be deciphered at their first appearance in the text, rather than later. Readers may not quickly recall terms in disciplines other than their own, and for novices to the subject will benefit from greater accessibility to the contributions. This minor sugges- tion does not diminish the value of the volume in any way. On the whole, Multilingual Individuals and Multilingual Societies is an excellent source for information on multilingualism and multilinguals, full of insights and inspiration for practical work and future studies. References Anchimbe, E. A. (Ed.). (2007). Linguistic identity in postcolonial multilingual spaces. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Aronin, L. & Singleton, D. (2012). Multilingualism. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Auer, P. (1998). From codeswitching via language mixing to fused lects: Toward a dynamic typology of bilingual speech. Interaction and Linguistic Structures, 6, 1–28. Brann, C. M. B. (1981). Trilingualism in language planning for education in Sub-Saharan Africa. Paris: UNESCO. ref. ED-81/WS/116. Georgiou, V. (2013). Managing language diversity in the Irish health services. In D. Singleton, J. A. Fishman, L. Aronin, & M. Ó. Laoire (Eds.), Current multilingualism: A new linguistic dispensation, 317–337. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Larissa Aronin Oranim Academic College of Education, Israel