The Upper Sorbian speaker community is the historically autochthonous ethnolinguistic group of Upper Lusatia, Germany, and is the context for Nicole Dołowy-Rybińska's monograph Upper Sorbian language policy in education: Bringing the language back, or bringing it forward?. Her book employs an ‘engaged sociolinguistics’ approach to investigate the lived experiences and attitudes of adolescent students at the only secondary school that serves the Upper Sorbian speaker community and is open to new learners, engaging with the voices that, as noted by the author, often go unheard by policymakers. The objective of the school is to produce full bilingualism among all of its learners, yet the author reveals contradictions and practices among the Sorbian policymakers and community that create barriers, rather than avenues, to the achievement of this goal. Dołowy-Rybińska artfully embeds her analysis of sociolinguistic conflict within the school in the greater context of Upper Sorbian language policy, and the dilemma that emerges between two opposing models for language revitalization: that of maintenance policies aimed at ‘native’ Sorbian speakers, and that of the integration of new speakers and new ways of participating in the Sorbian speaker community.

Dołowy-Rybińska analyzes data collected through mixed methods, primarily consisting of interviews and focus groups with a diverse group of students at the Upper Sorbian secondary school. In order to reflect the emic constructions of identity and speakerhood maintained in the Upper Sorbian community and in the everyday sociolinguistic practices of the school, Dołowy-Rybińska classifies her research participants into ‘Sorbians’, ‘Germans’, and the ‘bilingual group’. She reveals ideologies among the Sorbian group that frame their language—Catholic religion and Sorbian identity as inseparable—and underline their insistence on a barrier meant to protect the cohesion of the Sorbian community. Under the assumption that minimizing language contact will minimize cultural conflict, the segregation of linguistic groups and practices continues in the school, presenting problems for the incorporation of new speakers into the Sorbian community and, consequently, the revitalization of its language.

The disparate ideologies and attitudes of the research participants do not only speak to their experiences felt in the present but also to their differing visions for the future of the school and of the Upper Sorbian language. Dołowy-Rybińska deftly transitions the analysis of the participants’ imagined future for their speaker community into a discussion of the potential paths forward for the language and its management. As the subtitle of the book so neatly puts it, Upper Sorbian policymakers can bring the language back (language maintenance) or bring it forward (language revitalisation).

Overall, the book successfully conveys the perspectives of the students that, to differing degrees, live between Sorbian and German worlds. Dołowy-Rybińska reiterates throughout the text the importance of acknowledging the sociolinguistic reality of these students and of listening to their ideas and justifies her critique of Upper Sorbian language strategy with a painstaking analysis that points to the challenges for all language revitalization projects in an increasingly multilingual and multicultural Europe.