This newly released monograph analyzes the current status of Chinese dialects in contemporary China, paying special attention to Cantonese and Putonghua (or Standard Mandarin) in a Southern Chinese metropolis, Guangzhou. As an applied linguist living in Guangzhou for approximately a year, I read the book with great interest.

China is a vast multilingual nation where there are more than 2,000 more or less distinct dialects and subdialects spoken in different regions (Li Reference Li2006). Southern dialects are generally not intelligible to speakers of a Mandarin dialect or among themselves. That being the case, the promotion of Putonghua nationwide has been considered a key component in China's language policy. From the outset, the Chinese government had no intention to replace local dialects with Putonghua. But the considerable progress of promoting Putonghua has worried many local people, who are afraid that their dialects are regarded as inferior and may disappear in the future. Adding to the complexity, mass intranational migration brings to the fore the issue of identity. Based on Liang's doctoral fieldwork from 2009 to 2010, this book provides a critical account of language use, language attitudes, and identities in China, taking the multidialectal city Guangzhou (also known as Canton) as an example.

The book consists of five parts with the last two chapters (chapters 12 and 13) as appendices. Part I introduces the sociocultural and sociolinguistic background of the book. Chapter 1 is a very engaging chapter that recounts critical incidents caused by the controversies regarding the promotion of Putonghua in Guangzhou. A few socially significant events relating to the implementation of and contestation over language policies promoting Putonghua between 2010 and 2014 are also reviewed, making the chapter a good, up-to-date read for those concerned with dialect issues in China. Chapter 2 presents a brief historical and sociolinguistic overview of Chinese dialects and expands on the politics of dialects in multilingual China. Moreover, the chapter compares language policies regarding Chinese dialects in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

Part II elaborates the conceptual and methodological framework of the book. Chapter 3 begins with reviewing research models of attitudes as mental constructs and as discursive practice, and continues with previous empirical research on Chinese dialects. It then illustrates the discursive approach adopted in the study and the empirical foci and analytical concepts. The research design and the data collection are also explained in this chapter.

Part III and Part IV present the findings of the book, but readers may get lost because of the way that the findings of the subsets of research questions are presented. Part III examines the lived experience of being and becoming a member of a multidialectal community from the perspective of the meaning of mother tongues, language socialization at home, and everyday translanguaging practices of young people. Chapter 4 presents an overview of the multidialectal setting of Guangzhou, two primary school communities, and profiles of the participants. Following that, it addresses the first subset of research questions: (i) What are the participants' perceptions of the language situation in Guangzhou?, and (ii) How do they relate to dialects in their linguistic repertoires within such a sociolinguistic context? Chapter 5 investigates the third subset of research questions: (i) What are the students' usual language practices at home?, (ii) How are they socialized to make such language choices?, and (iii) How do they justify their choices? A case study explores how parents in a migrant family deal with the sociolinguistic challenges for their child in Guangzhou and how parents may influence the child's language use and attitudes. In chapter 6, drawing data from the focus group discussions, Liang addresses the fourth subset of research questions: (i) How do the students negotiate language choices and index language attitudes in interaction?, (ii) What kinds of competencies and needs can be identified in the process?, and (iii) What are the implications for education in similar contexts?

Part IV examines the roles and status of regional dialects at school, paying attention to the mediation of language policies at school, teachers' attitudes, and the impact of these on student behaviors. Chapter 7 explores the teachers' and the students' language practices at school and examines how the language ideologies of national language polices are mediated and become institutionalized in local school contexts. In addition to addressing the third subset of research questions (see the summary of chapter 5 in the last paragraph), the chapter also examines the second subset of research questions: (i) What are the teachers' usual language practices at school?, (ii) How do they regard language policies in relation to their own language practices?, and (iii) What are their perceptions of the relationship between dialects and education? Chapter 8 focuses on teachers' attitudes towards dialects at school, by investigating the role of school in relation to dialects and the impact of dialects on language learning.

As aforementioned, chapters 4 through 6 discuss the first, the third, and the fourth subsets of research questions, whereas Chapter 7 examines the second and the third subsets of research questions. I wonder whether it is possible to rearrange the sequence of the research questions so that the analyses would read more logically.

Part V brings the multiple threads together. Chapter 9 discusses the problems of monolingual identity in the era of multilingualism and the conflicts between the dominating language ideologies and lived experiences. In chapter 10, Liang draws our attention to the prevalence and potentially productive role of translanguaging at school. She then proposes a more open and positive attitude towards such practices. Chapter 12 displays the students' profiles. The last chapter (chapter 13) presents the profiles of the two primary schools and the teachers. It also examines in retrospect the mutually constitutive relationship between the author's autobiographical self, language identity, and the development of the research project.

Language is closely bound up with identity formation. Language attitudes often develop at an early age as children learn through their environment to distinguish between standard and nonstandard varieties (Garrett Reference Garrett2001). The majority of attitude studies on Chinese dialects to date, however, have investigated adults' language attitudes, for instance, university students (e.g. Kalmar, Yong, & Hong Reference Kalmar, Yong and Hong1987; Ng & Zhao Reference Ng and Zhao2014). Liang's book investigates primary school students at Grade 5. As such, the book is a welcome addition to the existing literature on Chinese dialects. Furthermore, Liang does not approach language attitude from the traditional cognitivist psychology perspective, which would have included questionnaires and experiments. Instead, language attitudes are conceptualized as discursive performances, which are situated, variable, and rich resources for positioning oneself in multiple social relations. Consequently, the author adopts linguistic ethnography to generate a considerable set of original, rich, complex, partially naturalistic interactional data. Ethnography enables the author to consider the social, historical, local, and interactional contexts of individual communicative acts, whereas sociolinguistic analytical concepts, such as contextualization and heteroglossia, help to ‘tie down’ the ethnographic data and make the link between the micro-analysis of interaction and the macro-analysis of society more convincing. This linguistic ethnography was not possible without the author's ‘insider’ access to the local communities, thus making the book a valuable asset to sociolinguistic studies on Chinese dialects.

There are some weaknesses in the book. First, as noted earlier, the findings and the sequence of the research questions might be better linked. Second, it appears that the book only presents interviews with female teachers. Nevertheless, chapter 13 includes a profile of a male teacher, Mr. Chik. Because gender may influence people's language attitudes, readers may be interested in male teachers' attitudes towards the relation between dialects and Putonghua as well. Finally, the study only focuses on participants with a Guangzhou hukou ‘households’ (see explanation on p. 69). I would also like to know more about the perspectives of students/teachers without a Guangzhou hukou.

In summary, as a study on language attitudes in fast-changing multilingual China, the book draws a necessarily complex picture of the various arrays of attitudes, and tries to trace and demonstrate the origins and directions of these arrays. For those who believe in or are bewildered by the complexity, hybridity, and fluidity of modern language experiences, this book would make for a pleasant read. The narrative of the book is clear, authentic, lively, and reflective while remaining intellectually sophisticated. It should be accessible to a broad readership.