This engaging monograph makes the case for a distinctive diasporic variety of German in Canada. Two sites with significant German-speaking populations are investigated: Edmonton and Kitchener Waterloo. Cross-generational differences are a significant dimension of the study, which demonstrates the fairly rapid emergence of a distinctive diasporic variety of German—distinctive primarily in that it is focused on standard German rather than regional varieties such as Saxon, Swäbisch, and Bavarian, which disappear rather rapidly from the repertoire. By contrast, it seems that other nonlinguistic regional cultural phenomena such as clubs, music and dance forms, and cuisine persist. Liebscher & Dailey-O'Cain show that differentiation within the German space still seems to be manifested, if not linguistically, at least in terms of these clubs, cultural activities, and cuisines, both Saxon and Swäbisch. This cultural complexity emerges in Nino's interview (pp. 208–209) and Claudia's on Oktoberfest (pp. 210–211), invoking the North/South dimension in Germany. There is also evidence of convergence and cultural mixing, such as when Peter, a North German, joins a Bavarian dance group. A significant issue that is addressed in the study is the differentiation of German speakers who originate from Germany and Austria and those who originate from what the authors term speech islands in other countries of Central and Eastern Europe. The authors show that the terminology adopted must be sensitive to historical issues, avoiding distinctions made notorious and hence unusable in the Nazi period.

The sequential mixed method methodology of the study encompasses both qualitative and quantitative analysis. The study is based on a corpus of interview data (discussed below). Analytically, the study draws on a familiar package of conversational analysis and membership categorization analysis, which is insightfully deployed in combination with quantitative analysis, which serves to indicate how characteristic the phenomena identified in the qualitative analysis are of the data set as a whole. This is convincingly done.

Liebscher & Dailey-O'Cain argue that the open-ended conversational interviews conducted with some seventy subjects of various ages in Canada approximate to casual conversation. This claim is interesting and brought to mind, as it might for other readers with longer memories, a paper by the late Nessa Wolfson (Wolfson Reference Wolfson1982:66) in which she argued that the sociolinguistic interview is not a speech event. I read this as I worked on my interview-based doctoral research through the 1980s, linking it to what I found at the time, as I was writing up my thesis, a rather chilling remark of Bourdieu's in his Outline of a theory of practice (Reference Bourdieu1979) in which he writes of the semitheoretical disposition provoked in informants by learned questioning. These perspectives seemed rather damning of the interview as a source of sociolinguistic data, suggesting that, interactionally, the real game was located elsewhere. Perspectives of this sort led to an ongoing privileging of interactional data in everyday settings and a sense that a study relying entirely on interviews was somehow a little unadventurous. Method and theory, however, has moved on somewhat since the late 70s and a theme issue of this journal edited by De Fina & Perrino in Reference De Fina and Perrino2011 argued against a sharp distinction between interview and interactional data, that the interview itself yielded a distinctive kind of interactional data that could be analysed using the theoretical tools that had been applied so productively to other kinds of interaction. The interview from this perspective is understood as an interactionally achieved co-production of meaning.

Another development since these arguments of Wolfson and Bourdieu is indeed an increased interest in the perspectives of research participants, understood not as semitheoretical but rather in terms of user theories or their linguistic ideologies. What research participants think about what they do has become of interest. So in two ways earlier strictures on the use of interview data in sociolinguistic research seem to have been overtaken by later developments in theory and method. Nowhere is the contribution of this interactional analytic approach to interview data better demonstrated than in the chapter on perceptions of the linguascape. This is a term to describe the sociolinguistic repertoire, introduced by the authors. It has ecological overtones that accords with their pervasive use of the notion of space as the theoretical framing and organizing metaphor for the study. The chapter demonstrates in an exemplary way the benefits of an analytical focus on the ways that speakers construct positions on the phenomena of their lifeworld through talk. If the chapter on attitudes and identities plays to the strengths of the interview data, I found the chapter on the multilingual resources themselves more tantalizing. Yes the authors were able to show us nuanced translanguaging in the interviews themselves, but I wanted at this point to find out about the ways that translanguaging operates across a range of contexts, in clubs and at social events, in families, in church. This type of fieldwork is intensive and difficult to combine with the time pressures of a busy tenured academic but is a perfect focus for doctoral research. So, while the authors make the very most of their data in this chapter, here I found myself wanting more.

Reading this book, with its focus on space and identity, raised for me certain nagging questions of theory and method. The discussion of identity here seems purely a discussion of positioning. But is positioning just about identity? There is surely more at stake in discourse than identity. As I write this review, I am positioning myself in relation to the authors, sometimes aligning with them, sometimes dissenting, but what I am doing is not just identity work, I am also doing some kind of intellectual, ideational work, engaging with their ideas. In writing this I am positioning myself in relation to this book and in relation to how I understand sociolinguistics as a field. Positioning involves more than identity work; it involves ideational content of some kind. Is identity and its sister subjectivity the only game in town these days? Sometimes it seems so. I write this as someone who has been caught up over the years in trying to make sense of identity work using empirical linguistic data. But there must be something more. Space is clearly significant in the intellectual framing of this book both as topos and as a theoretical construct. All theoretical constructs have their origins in the metaphoric potential of language and, however well defined, carry with them the ordinary language baggage of metaphor. This point is first made to my knowledge in Whorf's essay ‘The relation of thought and behavior to language’ (Whorf Reference Whorf and Spier1941). Think Noam Chomsky's deep and surface structures or Basil Bernstein's horizontal and vertical discourse. On p. 67, Bob says his knowledge of German is just there. On p. 75, Frida constructs a space for her mixed variety. So in this book, space is used in at least three ways: at times in a common sense, lifeworld sense; at times as a theoretical construct; and at times it is simply invoked by the spatial metaphor that Whorf first identified, used in terms such as positioning and alignment.

I noted certain gaps in the theoretical framing of the study. In a discussion of notions of community and space it is hard not to mention Mary Louise Pratt's seminal (Reference Pratt1991) work on the contact zone. The notion of language ideology used throughout the book deserved to be anchored in the literature cited. Careful attention is paid to the notion of positioning, but not to the related notion of stance, which had been comprehensively addressed in volumes edited by Jaffe (Reference Jaffe2009) and Engelbretson (Reference Englebretson2007). On p. 235, for example, the term alignment is used but not anchored in as a theoretical construct. Du Bois' (Reference Du Bois2007) stance triangle is an essential starting point for the study of identity work in talk.

The book is best on the subjectivity of language, space, and migration, precisely because of its focus on the interview where speakers are positioned to construct representations of themselves and others, their activities and context. The data yields at times some very poignant moments particularly in the data of those who migrated as children: on pp. 227–28, Bea tells how she was treated as a child as a German immigrant, as a Nazi by two girls, and also as a displaced person. On p. 197, Hanna as a child would not take rye bread or salami sandwiches to school because they were too German. Speakers also evidence linguistically, through different kinds of translanguaging, the ways that they position themselves and others in talk in the here-and-now of the interview. I would be curious however to know more about how this positioning takes place in situ, in cafés and clubs, in the German church, around the dinner table, and in other family interactions. I would hope that the writers or maybe their students will in due course take on such a project.