Lenore A. Grenoble & Jessica Kantarovich: Reconstructing Non-Standard Languages: A socially-anchored approach (IMPACT: Studies in Language, Culture and Society 52)

The book under review is intended to document the process of a sociolinguistic reconstruction of under-documented, non-standard historical varieties, demonstrated by Odessan Russian and several Russian lexifier pidgins.This broad perspective is reflected in the title, which emphasizes the reconstruction process, rather than the specifically Russian component of the investigated varieties.The book consists of seven chapters subdivided into three parts.Part I (ch.1-3) is of a theoretical and methodological nature.Part II (ch.4-5) contains the sociolinguistic reconstruction of Odessan Russian and three Russian lexifier pidgins.The authors aim to not just describe the linguistic systems as such, but "the social conditions of their use" (p.xii).Part III (ch.6-7) uses the data from Part II for a discussion of methodological issues that can be generalized beyond the Russian context into the wider field of historical sociolinguistics.Odessan Russian was a non-standard variety of Russian spoken between 1880 and the 1970s, but attested most strongly around 1900, in the then multilingual city of Odessa. 1 Especially the Yiddish substrate was an important factor; the variety and its stereotype are indeed mainly associated with Odessan Jews.Since approximately 1970, this variety of Russian has become moribund; only a few speakers (or rather, "rememberers") survive in America.The stereotype remains active in popular culture, though.Russian lexifier pidgins refer to contact varieties spoken in trade settings and border regions between roughly 1750 and 1917.None of these varieties are spoken anymore; they are documented largely in fictional dialogues from literary prose and in works written by Russian explorers.The stereotypes that persist even today give the book a methodological impetus: "to what extent can stereotypical speech be critically analyzed and incorporated into a linguistic reconstruction?"(p. 7).1 I follow the authors' use of place names in the form in which the speakers of the investigated varieties would have referred to them, e.g.Kiev and Odessa, rather than the Ukrainian forms in current use (p.xii).