This book resulted from the 2008 International Politeness Symposium in Hungary. It overviews linguistic politeness in major standard East Asian languages. It suggests a discursive approach that politeness researchers may productively follow when investigating how politeness is enacted in East Asian contexts. East Asia is defined by Kadar & Mills in historical-cultural terms, as societies influenced by Confucian or Neo-Confucian social ideology or written traditions (9). The book is in two parts. The first, “Theory,” contains four chapters and provides an introduction to theoretical and methodological issues in current politeness research in East Asia “from a fundamentally discursive perspective” (10). The second, “Practice,” contains five chapters focusing on how (im)politeness operates in languages of the region: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Chinese in Singapore. Chapters in Part 2 follow a similar pattern: an overview of politeness research on a particular language, theoretical/ideological views of linguistic politeness norms in the particular society, and finally analyses of authentic examples of (im)politeness in practice. Michael Haugh concludes the collection with an epilogue.

In the introduction, Kadar & Mills foreground what a discursive approach to politeness analysis involves: a “focus on the hearer's reaction to/evaluation of [authentic] polite and impolite utterances… contextual analysis and the possibility of multiple interpretations” (16). Reasons for this approach are clearly articulated: “in order to avoid subjectivity at the level of analysis and the exclusion of certain views about politeness” (8). The introduction finishes with a helpful list of analytic concepts and technical terms (16–17). In Ch. 2, “Politeness and culture,” Kadar & Mills further elaborate what a discursive approach to the analysis of politeness offers. They interestingly note that descriptions of people and cultural values are sometimes used to enact an individual's perceived notions of appropriateness (29). They argue that research generalizations about politeness norms of cultural groups need to first be described objectively (less ideologically), and then analyzed in terms of variability, “especially those which seem to be dominant” (44). Chs. 4 and 5 address the ostensible aims of the book, explicitly focusing on methodological and analytical models that can help identify the variation and provide the contextual detail necessary for sound politeness research of a discursive nature. Ch. 4, by Yuling Pan, “Methodological issues in East Asian politeness research,” provides a particularly useful framework for analysis of authentic interaction.

In Part 2, chapters address the challenge of applying the suggested approach: the researchers describe and establish variations within stereotypical notions of politeness norms in particular linguistic contexts. These chapters exemplify differences between how certain linguistic features are assumed to function in language-specific politeness models, and how they actually function in authentic interaction. Finally, Michael Haugh's epilogue reexamines essential theoretical and methodological points relevant to discursive approaches to politeness research and perceptively extends these, noting future directions for discursive politeness research. In sum, Politeness in East Asia is a significant contribution to the politeness field and is likely to be of note to a range of researchers and academics interested in this region.