The Linguist

24 The Linguist Vol/60 No/2 2021 thelinguist.uberflip.com REVIEWS The Language of Thieves Martin Puchner Granta 2021, 288 pp; ISBN 978-1783786404 Hardback, £16.99 Multilingualism and Politics Katerina Strani (ed) Palgrave Macmillan 2020, 365 pp; ISBN 978-3030407001 Hardback, £109.99 In Nuremberg in the 1970s, Martin Puchner watched with fascination the itinerants at his door: "Strange figures, dressed in long coats that had lost their original colours… When it rained, they smelled, and my mother wouldn't let them inside the house." There to get food, they spoke differently to others; and understood the signs scratched into the brickwork outside. Through his father and uncle, he learned that the visitors spoke Rotwelsch, a sociolect of Yiddish (itself largely from German and Hebrew). Spoken by peddlers, knife grinders, tramps and thieves, its vocabulary revealed an impoverished, hand-to-mouth existence on the road: chinnum ('lice'), gifar ('village'), lechem ('bread'), schul ('prison'). And the signs? A cross with a circle around it: food here; a hammer: food here in return for work; 'WW' (teeth): beware of the dog. He returned to this childhood obsession while studying in the USA. In an article from 1934 by his grandfather – an archivist and historian – he read that the "Jewification" of Germany had led to increased criminality. A photograph taken in 1937 emerged of his grandfather wearing a swastika. Puchner pursued two lines of inquiry: the extent of his grandfather's Nazism and his late uncle Günther's writings on Rotwelsch. The older man joined the Nazi party in 1930 and the Brown Shirts in 1933. After the war, despite his well-documented commitment and military decoration, he convinced the US authorities that he was not implicated in the atrocities. He was fined 600 Marks, released, and resumed his career. Günther was an archivist too, but his interests were in poetry, music and Rotwelsch. He translated parts of the gospels, Shakespeare and other texts into the beggar's cant. Were these creative efforts, over many years, a form of revenge or atonement? Perhaps they were an attempt to elevate Rotwelsch by infusing it with literature. Harvard professor Martin Puchner tells a story of Rotwelsch, archives, and reckoning with the Nazi skeletons in the family cupboard. It takes in interpreting at the Nuremberg war trials, Martin Luther, and digressions on Cockney and Esperanto. Earnest (and only occasionally preachy), The Language of Thieves: The story of Rotwelsch and one family's secret history is a compelling account of covert communication and a family at war. Graham Elliott MCIL Multilingualism and Politics: Revisiting multilingual citizenship is a collection of articles covering the relatively modern and under- studied topic of multilingualism. This reflects changes in the modern world arising from deliberate government policy in multilingual states and organisations, as well as developments in patterns of world trade and population movement. The first section focuses on the UK and the EU, offering interesting insights into the workings of the European Parliament (and Nigel Farage gets a whole chapter to himself). That may all seem rather retrospective now, but it is offset by placing multilingualism in the context of Brexit, and asking if people with a range of language skills were more likely to vote to remain. The second section considers the role of politics in a multilingual context, ranging from the vexed issue of Galician and whether it should conform to spelling conventions in Portuguese, to the likely impact of the Belt and Road Initiative on Hong Kong. Migrants from neighbouring countries are a useful source of appropriate language skills, but some argue that they are not fully integrated into Hong Kong's education system and therefore less able to participate fully in the economy. These chapters were possibly written before developments in Hong Kong regarding greater control from the mainland. The idea of a society which was "biliterate and trilingual" (i.e. fully fluent in English and Mandarin, and able to speak English, Cantonese and Putonghua) was mooted with the handover of power from Britain in 1997, but this may no longer be the case. The other articles cover an eclectic variety of topics, including minority language politics in the Croatian education system and views of multilingualism in Scotland (which might have been better placed in the first section). For those interested in creoles, there is an interesting analysis of language policy on Guadeloupe. The language of the plantations has been increasingly overshadowed by metropolitan French since Guadeloupe's integration as a département d'outremer in 1946, following 300 years of colonial rule. Multilingualism and Politics is part of an interesting range of titles on multilingualism that is being developed by Palgrave Macmillan. Although quite specialised, it is a useful volume for understanding this modern phenomenon, which is likely to grow in importance. Professor Tim Connell Hon FCIL

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