I was a bit hesitant about reviewing this at first, but after careful examination I discovered that it was all in English except for a few bits of Welsh poetry which can be safely skipped, so I agreed to take it on. I suspect that the editor guessed by my name that I might be bilingual and therefore picked me out on spec. In fact even my father suffers from what is referred to in the text here as “Consecutive bilingualism”, namely that he spoke Bengali at home and at primary school, but went to an English‐medium secondary school, came to the UK at the age of 18, in 1938, joined the RAF, and never went back except for rare holidays; so he is still not entirely fluent in English, however, he speaks to his young nephews and contemporaries in baby‐talk ‐ a source of great amusement to them.
I did not actually know that his condition was known as consecutive bilingualism (assuming that this is actually a generally accepted term, rather than one just used by the authors) and had considerable difficulty in finding it in this book. Consecutive bilingualism in the glossary gets merely a “see” reference to Simultaneous bilingualism, which refers on to a definition of Sequential bilingualism, but there is no subject index entry under Sequential, only one under Consecutive. The authors of this work clearly believe, wholeheartedly, that one language is as good as another, and possibly have extended this to thinking that one term is as good as another, and so are unwilling to indicate what is a preferred term even for such a central concept in their field. Alternatively, of course, it is possible that whoever compiled the very inadequate index did not consult whoever compiled the glossary, or vice versa.
The inadequacy of the index is a particular problem with this book as, although it is called an encyclopaedia, it is not arranged in alphabetical order but in a loose subject order. This makes it more of a handbook than an encyclopaedia, by my definition. Thus, to take another example, there is one subject index entry on the Cap Verde Islands, which refers one to a geographical section containing a small amount of information, most of which could easily be gathered from the Statesman’s Yearbook or Whitaker’s Almanac, but mentioning that the main lingua franca is Crioulu. There is no entry under Crioulu in the subject index, but there is a bit more about Cap Verde Creole in a section on Portuguese‐based pidgins, not referred to as Crioulu, and not indexed at all.
Ignoring the material which can easily be got from the Statesman’s Yearbook and other standard reference sources, and ceasing to try to use this as a reference encyclopaedia, what we are left with is a textbook, or handbook, on language and language education. The level is basic ‐ aimed at the lay reader ‐ which, coupled with the overall up‐beat tone, gives it a rather Reader’s Digest‐ish feel. There are numerous glossy illustrations, mostly of cheerful, smiling, ethnic children, and coloured boxes with nuggets of information, case studies, or semi‐fictional vignettes, breaking up the text in the approved modern manner. I feel a certain sympathy with the authors, and wish them well in their endeavours. They have clearly put a lot of work into this: their enthusiasm for the cultural value of bilingualism shines through every page and leads them to seriously underestimate some of the difficulties which bilinguals may experience in real life. There is a lot of material here giving general readers a useful discussion of a wide range of cultural, political and linguistic issues. Overall, however, I would not regard this as an essential reference tool, even for libraries specialising in language studies. Libraries catering for further education courses or undergraduate courses in cultural studies, linguistics or education might find it worth considering as a general textbook rather than as a reference book.
