Variation in the Caribbean is an edited collection of eleven articles on Caribbean creoles and local standard varieties written primarily from a sociolinguistic perspective. The anthology is divided into three parts. Part 1, “Variation and linguistic systems,” examines the variability of creole systems at the (morpho)syntactic and phonetic levels. Part 2, “Variation and identity,” analyzes written representations of Caribbean speech. In Part 2, Ch. 5 investigates written Bajan and the role of stance in framing discourse. Ch. 6 embodies the volume's title through the approaches used in analyzing stylistic variation in the transcribed speech of educated Jamaicans. Ch. 7 explores educated Jamaican speakers' language attitudes, such as notions of appropriateness/correctness, and metalinguistic awareness. In Part 3, “Variation and the community,” case studies on Tobagonian and Eastern Maroon Creole (Chs. 8 and 9) reexamine the creole continuum model, while Ch. 11 revisits another major model in the field, Acts of identity (Robert LePage & Andrée Tabouret-Keller, Cambridge University Press, 1985) as part of an overall discussion of Robert LePage's legacy. Ch. 10 explores the evolving functions of creole forms among adolescent peer groups in urban England.

The introduction to the volume suggests that “there are many things which sociolinguists working on Caribbean varieties still take for granted” (7), and identity continues to be overapplied and underelaborated (Rogers Brubaker & Frederick Cooper, Beyond “identity,” Theory and Society 29(1):1–47, 2000) in discourses on diasporic communities. Michelle Braña-Straw's work on Barbadians' vowel variation in England explains that “[m]aintenance is possible in the event that Barbadians wish to assert their own identity as distinct from both Ipswitch Anglos and Jamaicans” (59); however, the piece lacks any real exploration of the ways in which this particular diasporic community experiences notions of social collectivity. When space limitations preclude writers from a thorough scrutiny of their theoretical and cultural constructs, the loaded terms are better left unsaid. In this case, the notion of social networks is an adequate tool for explaining outcomes of language learning and vowel trajectories among these adults in contact. By contrast, Susan Dray & Mark Sebba's revision of England's language situation deserves considerable praise for moving beyond essentialist conceptions of language, race, and ethnicity. More than an inheritable, phenotype-based category, “being ‘black’” is presented as an active discursive process, as their abstract indicates: “[i]n their discourse, participants construct themselves (and their preferred practices…) as ‘black,’ where being ‘black’ is a position in the social order, defined by their practices, not by their ethnic background” (231).

The volume does illustrate the usual Jamaican- and Anglocentrism of creole studies, focusing heavily on English-based creole communities to the oversight of many non-Anglophone/non-Caribbean creole societies. It is to the credit of James Walker & Jack Sidnell that they use African American English to elucidate their discussion of coexistent systems of creole and English verbal negation on Bequia. Works on Sranan (Donald Winford), Tobagonian (Valerie Youssef), and Eastern Maroon Creole (Bettina Migge & Isabelle Léglise) alongside pieces on diasporic creole communities (Braña-Straw; Dray & Sebba) allow readers to further explore creoleness outside the immediate Caribbean context.

The papers contained in this volume utilize a multitude of the methodologies available for variation analysis in describing the complex Caribbean linguistic situation. Selected chapters can also be valuable to linguistic anthropologists and social scientists, and certainly instructors of quantitative sociolinguistics will want to consult this volume for supplementary course readings. In addition to some of the long-time contributors to pidgin-creole studies found in this volume, it is encouraging to see so many new names in a field where early giants like Hugo Schuchardt were denied scholarly status.