Book Review: The MIME Vademecum: Mobility and inclusion in multilingual Europe by Grin, F., Conceiçäo, M., Kraus, P., Marácz, L., Ozoliņa, Z., Pokorn, N., & Pym, A. (Eds.)

Abstract

epilogue could certainly have been edited onto the last chapter, but in doing so readers would have been deprived of the opportunity to draw their own inferences. In his introduction, the author claims his research contributed to change the discursive approach to patient–professional interaction in the hospital setting where it was conducted. Scant information is provided throughout the book on the specific nature of such change, how it was brought about, or its effects. Having said that, this should not detract from the book’s theoretical and methodological contributions. To Bonnin, discourse is the dynamic emergent upshot of interaction between an individual’s previous social trajectory and the constraining social forces among which it emerges; as such, it is always a possible vehicle of resistance to the status quo and a potential trigger of social change. Through this approach, the author draws attention to a sociolinguistic reality in the study of languages in contact: Linguistic diversity is better understood as linguistic inequality and the analysis of discourse in this light opens the door to desired social change.