In many Native American and Canadian First Nations communities, indigenous languages are important for the linguistic construction of ethnic identity. But because many younger speakers have limited access to their heritage languages, English may have an even more important role in identity construction than Native languages do. Prior literature shows distinctive local English features in particular tribes. Our study builds on this knowledge but takes a wider perspective: We hypothesize that certain features are shared across much larger distances, particularly prosody. Native cultural insiders (the first two co-authors) had a central role in this project. Our recordings of seventy-five speakers in three deliberately diverse locations (Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, North/South Dakota; Northwest Territories, Canada; and diverse tribes represented at Dartmouth College) show that speakers are heteroglossically performing prosodic features to index Native ethnic identity. They have taken a ‘foreign’ language (English) and enregistered these prosodic features, creatively producing and reproducing a shared ethnic identity across great distances. (Native Americans, prosody, ethnicity, ethnic identity, English, dialects)*

This study examines the linguistic aspects of the formation of a community of practice (CofP) and analyses one aspect of the common repertoire that is being actively developed within the community. On the one hand, it looks at the community itself, placing emphasis on the exact practices, beliefs, and resources that can identify a group brought together at times against their will, as a CofP. On the other, this research takes under scrutiny one specific linguistic variable (Japanese negation) to show how involvement in a CofP can bring about rapid and unexpected changes in the meaning and use of a linguistic variant. (Community of practice, indexical meaning, Japanese, negation)*

This article illustrates the ‘moving parts’ involved in the stylization of the voice of the Black preacher in the comedic performances of Richard Pryor with the ultimate goal of uncovering what these linguistic features help the performer to accomplish in interaction. Overall, while Pryor often utilizes hyperbolic and exaggerated features of Black preaching traditions and potentially Southern-inflected speaking styles in his performances, I argue that he engages in a type of linguistic subterfuge, blending elements of his own voice into a more favorable depiction of a witty, street-wise preacher. In fact, stretches of working-class speech, whose features overlap considerably with Pryor's ‘stage voice’, may blur the line between Pryor's ‘own’ personal stance and that of the preacher that he is constructing. (Black preachers, performance, stylization, comedy, African American English)*

Call centres have been widely criticised as standardised workplaces, and the imposition of calling scripts is often characterised as dehumanising and deskilling. But these accounts lack close analysis of how scripts are actually produced, taken up, and used by call-centre workers, and they are generally locked into dualistic analyses of control and resistance. In contrast, this article combines long-term ethnography with transcontextual analysis of the production, circulation and uptake of calling scripts. This reveals a good deal of collective and individual agency in processes of text-adaptation, and produces a rather more nuanced picture of work in a call centre. (Call centres, text trajectories, linguistic ethnography, standardisation)*

This article systematically explores the sequential contexts for making multiple requests during shop encounters. Based on video recordings in convenience stores in France and Finland, it describes the multimodal practices that buyers and sellers use to treat multiple requests as progressively building a global buying project. The purpose of this study is to demonstrate how multiple requests can be packed together, as relatively simple actions achieved simultaneously or successively in embodied and verbal ways either as subsequent contiguous sequences of actions, or as sequences of actions separated by inserted actions. This article also examines how requests are tied together, and how ‘late’ requests are fitted to the last sequential opportunities in the unfolding encounter. This analysis contributes to the study of commercial encounters and the buying process, as well as to the understanding of sequence organization. It likewise contributes to comparative analyses by discussing the similarities and specificities of this activity across cultural contexts and in different time periods. (Requests, shop encounters, social interaction, multimodality, French, Finnish)