This book is Volume 180 in Benjamins' long-running “Pragmatics and beyond” series. It had its roots in the Japanese Speech Style Symposium held at the University of Arizona in 2002, funded by the Japan Foundation and the National Science Foundation. While some of the articles in this volume were presented at the conference, some are new contributions from scholars who did not attend. The book consists of a dozen chapters written by fourteen contributors (almost all Japanese native speakers). First editor Kimberly Jones is an associate professor of East Asian Studies at Arizona and teaches Japanese and linguistics. Tsuyoshi Ono teaches Japanese linguistics in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Alberta. Most other authors, by reputation, are Japanese language teachers or Japanese linguists (the book does not provide information about the contributors).

All of the articles in the book address what the editors call “the messy reality of style shifting” in Japanese (1). The Japanese language is famous for having several distinct and highly noticeable registers. There are, for example, dichotomies between men's and women's speech, pronounced regional dialectical variants vis-à-vis a supposed standard language, registers associated with in-group and out-group allegiances, registers used in formal versus informal contexts, a complex set of honorifics, and various polite forms marking age, status, or occupation. It is generally assumed by both Japanese linguists and language teachers that these speech varieties reflect various perceived social distinctions between interlocutors, and as such, they are thought to be relatively constant. After all, in the middle of a conversation, persons cannot change, for instance, their educational level or gender. However, the editors argue that this assumption is largely a matter of faith, based more on native-speaker intuitions rather than natural data. This volume attempts to rectify this by looking at actually occurring spoken and written language. According to the editors, “[a]pproaches such as conversation analysis, discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, functional linguistics, and sociolinguistics have provided us with discoveries which could not have come from working solely with constructed data” (1). In other words, once examples of actual language use were examined it was found that style-shifting in Japanese was hardly uncommon.

Japanese is “almost certainly the best-studied language as far as style shifting is concerned” (2) and some of this work is shown here. In their contributions, Haruko Cook, Naomi Geyer, Shoko Ikuta, Senko Maynard, Mutsuko Hudson, and Satoshi Uehara and Etsuko Fukushima all discuss shifting between “polite” (desu/-masu) and “plain” predicates. Some surprising things are mentioned. For example, it was found that sometimes students will use the unexpected simple plain-form with professors, as when they when feel pressured about thesis problems: Nante iu no kana! ‘What can I say!’. Yuka Matsugu and Yoshiko Matsumoto examine gendered speech, while Shigeko Okamoto looks at shifting between “standard” Japanese and the Yamaguchi dialect. Kuniyoshi Kataoka explores spatial deixis, while Shoji Takano looks at the prosody of style shifting.

Though technical at times, all of the articles are accessible to the general reader, and there is much to offer both the theoretical linguist and the social anthropologist, even if they are not Japanese specialists. For those who are Japanese sociolinguists, however, this book is a must-read.