Book Notes

Mike Cormack and Niamh Hourigan (eds), Minority Language Media.

Clevedon, OH, Buffalo, NY and Toronto: Multilingual Matters Ltd, 2007.
£24.95. 274 pp.

A minority language exists because another, proximate language is spoken by far

more people and so holds sway in the contexts that count. A majority language
constructs other languages as minority by fact of being more pervasive and pow-
erful. At least in Europe, over the past 20 years or so, minority languages have
become officially recognized and supported, not least through a specific charter
designed to protect and promote them. The question of how various media may
be used to help minority languages survive is critical, and unsurprisingly is a
pressing concern of those involved in their study. This valuable collection of essays
deals with many of the key issues in the field of minority-language media studies.
Most of the chapters are devoted to European minority languages. They move
from general to more specific issues. Topics covered include the media needs of
minority-language users, minority languages and multiculturalism, minority-lan-
guage television campaigns, digital multimedia and minority languages, the his-
torical development of minority-language broadcasting, the Internet and
minority cultures, local television in the Basque Country, media and linguistic
policy in Catalonia, translation and minority-language media, sign language and
television in the UK, and Welsh television programming. Mike Cormack pro-
vides a clear and succinct introduction to the book, and Niamh Hourigan rounds
it off with an outline of key themes for future scholarship in minority-language
media studies. These two editors have assembled a rewarding set of essays that
will not only help to bring greater attention to minority-language media but also
to foster their further study.

Robert T. Craig and Heidi L. Muller (eds), Theorizing Communication:

Readings across Traditions. Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore:
Sage, 2007. US$44.95. 525 pp.

According to Robert Craig, there are seven distinct traditions that feed into
and inform communication theory: rhetorical, semiotic, phenomenological,
cybernetic, sociopsychological, sociocultural and critical. Bringing these

European Journal of Communication Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications

(Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore) www.sagepublications.com,
Vol 23(2): 257–268. [10.1177/0267323108089224]

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E U R O P E A N J O U R N A L O F C O M M U N I C AT I O N 2 3 ( 2 )

together in the interests of an integrative approach, the editors sample key

texts as primary source readings and add introductory notes and suggestions
for further research. They organize their material into sections based on these
traditions, with two initial units, the first offering historical and cultural
sources for communication theory, the second showcasing Craig’s 1999 article
on communication theory as a field in which the seven-traditions approach was
outlined. Readings in each section are chronologically presented in order to
remind us that any work within a specific tradition builds on earlier work, even
when it may be sharply critical. According to Alastair MacIntyre, traditions,
when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Each of the traditions sampled in
the volume attends to and talks of communication in different ways, and pro-
vides scholars with varying discourses within which to think about and discuss
communication phenomena. This does not prevent movement between them.
The virtue of looking at these readings side by side actually encourages such
movement. The readings themselves are not of course the be-all-and-end-all of
each paradigmatic track; rather, they trace particular patterns of thought that
have significantly affected the development of one of the traditions and con-
tributed more broadly to the scholarship of communication theory. In each sec-
tion, they generally begin with path-laying contributions and move through
specific applications or approaches to current statements, and in some cases
radical new departures from the tradition in its previous line of trajectory. The
volume as a whole provides a useful teaching resource that can be used on both
undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.

Mary Talbot, Media Discourse: Representation and Interaction. Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 2007. £14.99. 198 pp.

Media discourse occurs within and flows across the different component areas of
communications circuits and, as a cultural presence in both production and con-
sumption, is an integral feature of everyday life. Its study is of huge importance.
In this introduction, Mary Talbot discusses media discourse in relation to three
distinct sites of interaction: production communities, audience communities and
producer–audience interaction. These are in turn discussed via three modes of
interaction: face-to-face interaction, mediated interaction and mediated quasi-
interaction, these particular distinctions being taken from John Thompson. She
includes samples from radio as well as television, deals more with broadcast talk
than with print media, focuses only on non-fiction genres and gives only minimal
treatment to online media. Despite the attention paid to interaction as well as rep-
resentation, Talbot adds little that is distinctive or new. The book comes into its
own through the mini case studies. These provide good examples of how to pro-
duce written transcripts from spoken talk, and Talbot deals with them effectively
enough. Outside of the case studies, the book offers a reasonable outline of key
concepts and issues in discourse analysis, but tends to be rather derivative and
uneven. It is serviceable and set out well, but hardly stands out against its com-

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