Not another work about the French of young people living on the estates? Françoise Gadet opens her preface to the present volume with this rhetorical question. It is true that the accents (there are more than one) of the young inhabitants of the cités obsess French intellectuals and journalists considerably, so that the spate of observations, more or less uninformed, shows little sign of lessening. This is largely because the banlieues, the unwise post-war housing estates where many French people of immigrant origin find themselves marooned, are emblematic of the social and ethnic divisions that sit uneasily with the French republican conception. The irony is that the estates reinforce these divisions and promote the communautarisme that in France is officially ruled out.

But amid the torrent of apocalyptic commentary can be discerned a trickle of sober description and analysis. Fagyal's book is concerned, as its subtitle states, with the influence of what the author calls their langues d'héritage upon the French of a sample of adolescents living in La Courneuve, an estate to the north-east of Paris. This book goes into more phonetic and supra-segmental detail than is usual in works on the subject. Chapter 1 stresses, in the context of immigration, the important role that language contact has played and continues to play in the evolution of French, a point worth making in view of the halo of purity that still surrounds the language, and then considers how banlieue French has been represented in the press. This account includes, among the misinformation that one expects from journalists, a few rash pronouncements by some quite eminent linguists who should really have known better. Chapter 2 looks in some detail at the banlieues in general, as regards their sociology and their role in language contact, and then at La Courneuve in particular, while Chapter 3 describes the fieldwork methodology and lays out the hypothesis to be examined, the one that everyone subscribes to in a very general way: this is to do with the influence of Arabic, more precisely Maghreb Arabic, on banlieue French. It would clearly be a shame to take the money, as it were, if one adopted this approach without taking a fresh and thorough-going look at the issue. There is no such danger here. The author adopts a comparative perspective by looking at two groups of French adolescents, one of Maghreb origin and the other European; one aim adopted here is to see to what extent the banlieue features are shared by bilingual and monolingual speakers.

In Chapters 4 and 5 we come to the core of the book, the analysis of the rhythmic, vocalic and consonantal features that observers have noted as being characteristic of banlieue French. The interplay between these is too intricate to be described fully or even adequately here, but in caricature, features have clearly been imported from the langues d'héritage, and then restructured in subtle ways. Chapter 4 concentrates on rhythm: the question, a complex one, has to do with the effects on this variety of French of the stress timing characteristic of Arabic. It is complex because stress timing seems to be associated with languages that have heavy consonant clusters, which of course French has not. Stress timing entails vowel elision or reduction, so that the effect upon the French vocalic system, which standardly has no reduction apart from schwa, is highly distinctive. In Chapter 5 the author examines the segmental features of interest; these seem to derive, in part at least, from what is examined in the previous chapter. The first principal feature is vowel devoicing, which occurs seemingly under the influence of Arabic, a language short on vowels: the effect can be hinted at in spelling by p'rt'r for partir. The fascination here is again to do with fine-grained social–linguistic structure: word-final vowel devoicing is a feature of standard French, and as such can be subject to mockery by these speakers. But examination at a finer level of phonetic detail shows a type of ‘épithèse consonantique’ that has different social indexing again. A further feature is a use of glottal stops differing from that found in standard French, where they simply demarcate word boundaries; in the variety of the bilingual speakers sampled they have a more emphatic value as syllable onsets, this connected perhaps with the phonemic status of the glottal stop in Arabic.

Chapter 6 takes a more detailed look at two informants who from a social-class point of view are identical, and here one is reminded of Laks's work in Villejuif. La Courneuve has the classic characteristics that promote cohesive social networks and hence vernacular norms, but of course some speakers resist these, or are able to transcend them, while others find advantage in what the networks can offer. The research issue of interest in this regard is whether the outward-looking speakers are exporting some of the features into mainstream French. It is too early to tell, but the question remains of compelling interest in view of the ‘reverse assimilation’ detectable in comparable districts in the UK.

The book is well laid out and has been carefully proofed. It has two full indexes. A slight irritation is that the headers running across verso and recto refer only to the book's title, rather than giving chapter titles too. The author has had much recourse to acronyms and other types of notation, which do save space but lay somewhat of a burden on the reader's memory.

This is quite a short volume, but the impression one takes away from it is of remarkable breadth and depth. The density is due in part to the author's gift for concise but clear expression, and in part to her ability to focus on what is essential. The major contribution lies in her success in bringing out the subtlety behind the stereotype. No doubt further rummaging will be done, and we can of course expect the situation to evolve, but meanwhile this book is the indispensable resource for anyone who wants to know about the subject, or pass on that knowledge in courses of variation in contemporary French, where the banlieues really cannot be ignored.