Dwi Noverini Djenar and Jack Sidnell, eds. Signs of Deference, Signs of Demeanour: Interlocutor Reference and Self-Other Relations across Southeast Asian Speech Communities

The edited collection Signs of Deference, Signs of Demeanour is an important milestone in bringing the insights of linguistic ethnography into conversation with the field of Southeast Asian studies.The book also signifies the expansion of the field outside the traditional centers of Europe and North America, stemming from a collaboration between Australian and North American scholars and published in Singapore, which makes it more readily available for an Asian readership.The topic of the volume may sound a bit obscure at first glance, but for anybody who is even slightly familiar with the languages of Southeast Asia the subject matter will be immediately relatable.The book is ultimately about how we refer to ourselves and to others in everyday conversation, and how that affects social and intersubjective relations and intersubjective relations on both micro scales-for instance, power asymmetries between kin-and more macro contexts, such as political speech.In each case, the choices we make in how we refer to ourselves and others are crucial to understanding how we as speakers are perceived and how our speech acts are interpreted by our interlocutors.The book's motivation draws from the domination in sociolinguistics over the years of the Brown and Gilman model of interlocutor reference.Roger Brown and Albert Gilman wrote an influential article in which they generalized the European pronoun division between T (from the French tu) and V (from the French vous) to pronoun usage universally across languages, arguing that T forms signal "intimacy" and V forms are used in asymmetrical "power" relations (Brown and Gilman 1968).This argument has been criticized in later sociolinguistic and linguistic ethnographic study, but the "common sense" underlying the argument still holds sway in much of the discussion about person reference cross-linguistically. America, and now Australia, as is attested by the affiliations of the contributors to this volume.My hope is that with more volumes like this, the field can expand and be taken up by those located at institutions in Southeast Asia who can bring a native-speaker and context-specific sensibility to the subject matter, expanding and deepening the discussions even further.