This study examines the social functions of codeswitching (CS) between Standard Arabic (SA) and Dialectal Arabic (DA). The data came from thirty-five audio and video recordings in the domains of religious lectures, political debates, and soccer commentaries. The findings suggest that speakers create a functional division between the two varieties by designating issues of importance, complexity, and seriousness to SA, the High code, and aligning less important, less serious, and accessible topics with DA, the Low code. The CS patterns therefore reproduce the unequal social values and distribution of SA and DA in the Arabic sociolinguistic landscape and simultaneously call for a reconceptualization of the notion of diglossia as presented in Ferguson's (1959) work. Other functions of CS as a marker of speakers' attitudes and as an index of pan-Arab or Muslim identities are discussed. (Arabic, bidialectal codeswitching, High/Low dichotomy, functional diglossia, identity, language attitudes)*

This article presents a conversation-analytic account of the various usages of the Kiswahili particle ah as it is routinely employed in naturally occurring Kiswahili conversation. Adopting a strategy reminiscent of the one Heritage and others adopted for English oh, it is argued that the seemingly disparate uses of this “language-specific object” represent various context-specific particularizations of a single semantic core. The basic claim is that ah constitutes a response cry that indexes to the other interlocutors the speaker's negative evaluative stance toward a particular issue. In this capacity, it frequently occupies the turn-initial position of a second pair part. Depending on the specifics of the sequential environment, the “object” of the indexed stance is traceable to either the particular item that is being talked about or the action performed in the preceding first. In the former case, the particle is used to demonstrate the speaker's affiliation with the previous speaker. In the latter case, it is used to demonstrate his disaffiliation with the previous speaker. (Kiswahili, particle, stance, second pair parts, turn-initial position, conversation analysis, comparative perspective)*

Conversations about serious life changes in old age may be expected to sound painful, but data of conversational narratives by elderly Japanese women even on topics related to illnesses or the death of a husband show highly engaging, lively exchanges, frequently accompanied by humor and laughter among the participants. The common feature in the conversations recounting psychologically intense experiences is a shift to detailed depictions of specific scenes from the quotidian perspective. This phenomenon, which I call quotidian reframing, is signaled by linguistic and paralinguistic quotidian framing cues. Quotidian reframing can function as a useful discourse strategy to relieve tension and let the participants regain the feeling or stance of quotidian self, the identity that they consider “normal.” A detailed account of the quotidian frame draws on such ideas as frame, footing, lamination, and positioning. (Discourse analysis, frame, identity, humor and laughter, older Japanese women)*

Do linguistic identities formed in high school endure after adolescence? Do age-related linguistic differences represent community trends over historical time, or are they age-graded practices that change over biographical time? Catalan advocates worry that perceived Castilian dominance in adolescents' peer relations and media consumption forecasts the community's sociolinguistic future. To investigate the possibility of change in bilingual repertoires after adolescence, participants in a 1987 ethnographic study of high school students in metropolitan Barcelona were reinterviewed after twenty years. The reinterviews of L1 Castilian-speakers showed increased mastery and use of Catalan even among those who had been functionally monolingual and most resistant to Catalan in high school. Higher education, the workplace, romance, cosmopolitan travel, and parenthood were triggers of such postadolescent change in the linguistic repertoire. Informants produce a common narrative attributing linguistic transformations to maturational processes that reduce the shame and intolerance of difference that inhibit adolescent second language use. (Bilingualism, second language acquisition, longitudinal research, language and identity, adolescence, Catalan, Catalonia)*