Welsh Journals

town clerk of Newport, and inevitably, on the balance between serving and overriding the public interest when nationalised industries were created. The achievements of the all-Wales Gas Board are, naturally, established in a technical sense; however, T. Mervyn Jones is as blunt in his assertion that the federal structure of the Gas Board, and his defence of it in the late 1960s, brought about his own removal at the hands of 'monolithic centralizers'. Names are named. Privatization is, he asserts, one of the very mixed fruits that have come about as a result. His detailed argument will re-pay study as will his assertion (learned at the knee, perhaps, of Thomas Jones) that local initiatives are more valuable than imposed solutions. Certainly, his own account validates that observation, for this is the autobiography of a Welshman who has lived, in a straightforward fashion, in and for a British polity which has never caused him a moment's thought about a 'crisis of identity'. In this, too, T. Mervyn Jones has been as representative of twentieth- century Welsh reality as he has been linked to a particular tradition within Welsh public life. A personal tale really is, in this case, a public history. D. B. SMITH Cardiff THE SOCIOLOGY OF WELSH. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE, No. 66. Special Issue edited by Glyn Williams. Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 1987. Pp. 127, 1 map, 10 tables, 8 graphs. DM40. Available from Welsh Books Council, Castell Brychan, Aberystwyth, Dyfed. Following the early pioneering researches of human geographers, recent years have seen a growing volume of research in the general area of sociology as applied to language and ethnicity. This has led to the rapid emergence of that new interdisciplinary field known as 'geolinguistics', merging the interests of sociologists, anthropologists, human geographers, historians and specialists in linguistics. The country of Wales, with its long history of bilingualism, has provided many interesting arenas for the development of new concepts and a small, but influential band of active researchers have made substantial contributions to international scholarship. Therefore, it is very appropriate that Dr. Glyn Williams of the University College of North Wales, Bangor, and one of the pioneers in the sociology of Wales, should have been invited to edit this special issue of the International Journal of the Sociology of Language. A rich admixture of new original research and reviews of current thinking, this important collection of papers is of considerable interest to contemporary historians as well as to social scientists. Two papers, in particular, stand out and offer new insights. In the first of these, 'Bilingualism, class dialect and social production', Dr. Williams develops further his ideas on the 'cultural division of labour'. Issues of social class variation have been virtually ignored with reference to 'minority languages': often it is difficult to identify the 'class location' of a bilingual person when he uses the minority language; and this has helped to sustain the somewhat misleading idea that such societies are classless-