Van Herreweghe and Vermeerbergen's co-edited book is the 10th volume in the Sociolinguistics in deaf communities series published by Gallaudet University Press. As I have noted in earlier book notices in SSLA, this series constitutes the leading collection of published scholarly and academic work dealing explicitly with sociolinguistic issues in deaf communities around the world. This latest volume is an interesting and valuable addition to the earlier works in the series and provides significant insights into sociolinguistic issues in a number of lesser-known (at least in the North American context) natural sign languages.

This volume consists of 10 separate papers and is divided into five thematic sections. The origin of the volume lies in a colloquium on the standardization and codification of sign languages organized as part of a sociolinguistics symposium at Ghent University in 2002, although this volume contains both articles drawn from that colloquium and others produced later. The five sections of the book, which in many ways parallel the major foci in sociolinguistics in general and in the sociolinguistics of sign languages in particular, include multilingualism and language contact, variation, language policy and planning, language in deaf education, and language attitudes. Among the particular European sign languages discussed in the volume are British Sign Language, Finnish Sign Language, Finland-Swedish Sign Language, Flemish Sign Language, Irish Sign Language, Netherlands Sign Language, Spanish Sign Language, and Swedish Sign Language.

What is especially interesting and promising in this volume is that most of the authors, as a group, are relatively young and junior scholars, generally at the start of their careers. If the papers in this volume are anything to judge by, the sociolinguistic study of sign languages in Europe is in very good hands, and we have much to look forward to in the future.