REVIEWS empirical data that are displayed in his work. Most of the articles are based on data which he gained during altogether more than two years of field work in North India, one deals with data on code-switching in Norway, one consists of a comparative analysis of situations as culturally and linguistically distant as a Norway and India community, one analyses data from a Mexican-American bilingual situation in the southwestern United States. The geographical range is as impressive as the power of theoretical and methodological analysis and as - last but not least - the range of practical and political implications Gumperz does not tire of pointing out: problems of language planning and construction, communicative barriers for social change and innovation, educational policies at the institutional level, all in linguistic situations which are considered basically as structured in code-like ways. One idea came to the reviewer's mind again and again while reading the different pieces of work. One would wish that Gumperz might find time to put his several pieces of work on India, those published in this collection and those published elsewhere, together as a monograph. It would demonstrate even more the truth of his conclusion that 'the analysis of speech variation should form an integral part of the study of South Asian civilization' (91), as of course, of any civilization. He has the data, the concepts and the methods at hand and un- questionably disposes of the scientific competence to do so. Reviewed by FRITZ SACK Lehrstiihle fur Soziologie Universitat Regensburg (Received 8 April 1974) Regensburg, West Germany WILLIAM LABOV, Sociolinguistic patterns. (Conduct and Communication, 4.) Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972. INTRODUCTION The 1960's in America saw the gradual and then increasingly widespread erosion of the Chomskyan paradigm established by Syntactic structures and Aspects of the theory of syntax. It is commonplace these days to identify Chomsky's contribu- tion to linguistics as a revolution conforming to Kuhn's account of scientific revolutions (1962). Far less agreement is to be found on the status of recent deve- opments. Do they represent a counter-revolution (Katz & Bever forthcoming), or the beginning of another revolution (Bailey 1971)? The answer seems to depend partly on one's ideological alignment, and also partly on the extent of one's willingness to find a common purpose among the disparate activities of the 'new linguistics' of the late sixties and early seventies. In many respects, this 'new linguistics' appears to be divided into two camps. On the one side there is