An important study of how signs and sign relations create social and linguistic differences - and unities.

Susan Gal is Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Chicago. She is author of Language Shift (1979) and The Politics of Language (in Hungarian, 2018), as well as co-author with Gail Kligman of Politics of Gender after Socialism (2000) and co-editor with Kathryn Woolard of Languages and Publics: The Making of Authority (2001).

Prologue: questions and exhibits; Acknowledgements; Introduction; Part I. Ethnography: 1. Wolof in Senegal; 2. German-Hungarians in Hungary; Part II. Semiotics: 3. Ingredients: signs, conjectures, perspectives; 4. Comparison: the semiotics of differentiation; 5. Dynamics of change in differentiation; Part III. Sites: 6. Situating ideological work; 7. Among and between sites; 8. Scales and scale-making: connecting sites; Part IV. Pasts: 9. Library to field: ideologies in nineteenth-century linguistic research; Coda: avenues of inquiry.