Recent research on narrative has widened the scope of analysis, suggesting the value of reexamining the canonical Labovian view of the structure and function of personal-experience narrative. This article suggests that narrative is not simply a way of evoking and shaping experience in time. Rather, narrative can evoke and shape cultural “chronotopes” (Bakhtin 1981) or nexuses of time, space, and identity. To illustrate this, I analyze a narrative from an oral history related in 1972 by a young woman whose volunteer work in the mid-1960s led to the rehabilitation of a small African American enclave in a middle-class White suburb. Analysis of clause types, constructed dialogue, existential there, deixis, verb chains, and referring expressions shows that the narrative is a blend of genres evoking place as well as personal identity linked to complex coordinates of time and space, and dependent intertextually on other parts of a larger story. (Narrative, oral history, chronotope, space, place, identity, genre)*

The sudden shift from power to solidarity in Iran in the face of the sociopolitical upheaval in the country has yielded some interesting changes in the forms of address in Persian. In general, since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, forms of address in Persian have undergone a sociolinguistic simplification. In post-revolutionary Iran plain speech and forms of address marking solidarity have gained popularity, whereas asymmetrical forms reflecting the complex social class structure of pre-revolutionary Iran have gradually declined. This article gives a sociolinguistic account of the forms of address in present-day Iranian Persian and documents the impact of the revolution on this aspect of the Persian language. (Sociopolitical change, language change, forms of address, politeness systems, Iranian Persian)

The discourse on the opening of a bilingual university along the Texas-Mexico border leads us to propose a theory of ‘converse racialization’ through which the local Spanish is being progressively ‘unmarked’ and disassociated from the language practice of Mexican Americans. Converse racialization, as the equal and opposite co-constituting underside of racialization, shifts the directionality of semiotic indexes away from a particular ‘race’ or ‘ethnicity’ (including whiteness) and produces an apparent state of ‘unmarkedness’. We argue that the process of ‘unmarking’ Spanish has social, economic, and racializing consequences. Specifically, the language-as-resource discourse obscures and rearticulates the ‘deficiency perspective’ that continues to perpetuate structural inequalities that Latinxs in the border face. (Racialization, higher education, critical race theory, bilingualism, neoliberalism)*

Newspaper reports, political policy papers, and investigations by social scientists concerning issues related to the presence of a community of migrant workers in Belgium are subjected to a systematic, pragmatic analysis. The analysis reveals an eminently coherent world of beliefs and attitudes with respect to (1) perceptions of the “other,” (2) the self-perception of majority members, (3) formulations of “the problem,” and (4) proposed solutions. This world of beliefs and attitudes is shown to be centered around stable – even if vague – notions of culture, nation and state, democracy and human rights, and around related recipes for “integration” that reveal a collective psyche profoundly troubled by the very idea of diversity in society (linguistic or otherwise). Homogeneity appears to be a strict norm for average members of Belgian society, irrespective of the specific political positions they take. (Minority politics, language and ideology, pragmatics, political rhetoric, news reporting, ethnicity)

An attempt is made at defining the phenomenon of Indoubil. Its origin, use, and function are discussed. Indoubil, the language of Bukavu's [Zaire] younger generation, would seem to serve a number of purposes. It is argued that Indoubil functions not only as a means of identification for a particular age group but that in a variety of contexts it is also used to neutralize the illeffects of ethnicity. (Ethnicity, melting pot, lingua franca, Swahili)

The speech of native speakers of Indian English has generally been neglected in studies of English in South Asia. This article describes a variety of Indian English used by a section of the Anglo-Indian community in Madras, South India. A comparison of this variety to available descriptions of “General” or “Educated” Indian English shows that the two are substantially similar, but that the Anglo-Indian variety differs in two features: deletion of/h/ (h-dropping) and the distribution of r-lessness. The community shows classbased variation in the phonological feature of h-dropping and in one syntactic feature: auxiliary movement in questions. Sources for features of Anglo-Indian English are discussed, including possible inheritance from both standard and non-standard BrE dialects as well as transfer from Tamil, the likely substrate Indian language for this section of the Anglo-Indian community.(South Asia, Indian English, language variation)

This paper examines the goals of prescriptive grammar and the causes and consequences of the rift between prescriptive and theoretical linguistics. It also proposes a principle for guiding prescriptive recommendations in the future as well as a theoretical framework and procedure for predicting the consequences of prescriptive recommendations. The procedure illustrates a hypothetical prescription: the substitution of singular they for prescriptive he. Projected benefits the prescription include neutral connotation, naturalness, simplicity, and lexical availability. Projected costs include covert and overt referential ambiguity; partial ambiguity; conceptual inaccuracy; loss of precision, imageability, impact, and memorability; bizarreness involving certain referents and case forms; distancing and dehumanizing connotations; unavailability of the ‘he or she’ denotation; potentially disruptive and long-lasting side effects on other areas of the language. Procedures are also illustrated for determining the relative frequency of such costs and benefits and for estimating the relative disruptiveness of the costs normal language use. Implications of the data for several issues general interest to linguistics and psychology are explored. (Ambiguity, language change, prescriptive grammar, theoretical linguistics, language planning, pronouns, neologisms.)

Studies on stylised language use have tended to focus on the creative exploitation of linguistic heteroglossia among urban multi-ethnic youth. This article argues that there are good reasons for exploring how such practices can also be initiated by norm-enforcing white adults such as teachers. I report on linguistic ethnographic fieldwork in one mixed-ethnicity class at a Brussels Dutch-medium school and describe how one teacher often produced the creative, stylised language use one usually associates with younger speakers. The analysis emphasizes that while teacher stylisations provided alleviation from the friction between linguistic expectations and the reality of the classroom floor, they were also functional in maintaining the school linguistic policy inasmuch as they typified nonstylised, nonaccented, and standard language use as normal and expected. These findings suggest that stylisations can be closely tuned to linguistic normativity and reproductive of wider patterns of sociolinguistic stratification. (Stylisations, urban heteroglossia, crossing, classroom interaction, Brussels, Dutch, enregisterment)*

Multilingualism is often framed as human capital that increases individuals’ labor market value. Such assertions overlook the role of ideology in assigning value to languages and their speakers based on factors other than communicative utility. This article explores the value assigned to Spanish-English bilingualism on the United States labor market through a mixed methods analysis of online job advertisements. Findings suggest that Spanish-English bilingualism is frequently preferred or required for employment in the US, but that such employment opportunities are less lucrative. The results suggest a penalty associated with Spanish-English bilingualism in which positions listing such language requirements advertise lower wages than observationally similar positions. Quantitative disparities and qualitative differences in the specification of language requirements across income levels suggest that bilingual labor is assigned value through a racial lens that leads to linguistic work undertaken by and for US Latinxs being assigned less value. (Multilingualism, labor market, Spanish in the United States, economics of language, raciolinguistics, human capital)*

Creolists have been showing that the use of codes in Creole societies is linguistically motivated, but these scholars have neglected the social principles informing the use of language varieties in these societies. This paper takes the position that the use of Creole and English varieties in Guyana is socially motivated. The typical Guyanese speaker uses linguistic items which are socially appropriate or mandated in the social context or cultural milieu he finds himself in, and uses items from both English and Creole. The speaker's use of linguistic forms seems to be related more to his conscious or subconscious social intentions than to linguistic principles which inhere in the basilect to acrolect continuum model with which many creolists work. The linguistic behavior of nine groups of individuals from three communities in Guyana is examined within a theoretical framework proposed by R. B. LePage (1972, 1973, 1977). This framework allows us to see these groups, and individuals within them, as exploiting the codal resources of their society to their social advantage. (Sociolinguistics, Creole linguistics, language contact)

This article describes a secret language called “Gypsy” spoken in an English-derived creole speech community on the Caribbean island of Bastimentos in Panama. Data from this cryptolect are used as a means to examine language variation on the island. This article highlights the fact that a range of English-derived creole varieties exists in Bastimentos, lacking the effects of a lexically related metropolitan variety in the same geographical area. (Creole, cryptolect, Panama, secret language, speech play, variation)

Using the frameworks of the political economy of language, and of language use as acts of identity, this study attempts to describe and analyze the situation of natively anglophone wives living with their Tunisian husbands in Tunisia – a speech community characterized by Arabic diglossia and Arabic/French bilingualism. Particular attention is devoted to these women's beliefs about using Tunisian Arabic (TA), the native language of their husbands, and the ways in which access to TA or the use of it becomes a site of conflict between husbands and wives, or mothers and children, in these mixed marriages. (Gender, identity, political economy of language, ideology, Tunisia, Arabic, francophonie, diglossia, code-switching, bilingualism, multilingualism, family relations)

A central concern in linguistics is assessing the linguistic competence of individuals or groups. Formal linguists usually accomplish this by the study of intuitions with little regard for observed usage, while survey sociolinguists usually depend on observations – especially the data of “spontaneous” interviews – with little regard for intuitions. In this paper I argue that survey sociolinguists need to make greater use of repeated recordings and elicited intuitions.

The existence of this need is illustrated in most detail by an attempt to replicate an earlier implicational analysis of pronominal variation in the Guyanese creole continuum. It is shown that with repeated sampling and the inclusion of elicited intuitions, the discontinuities on which implicational scaling depends disappear almost entirely. With a clearer idea of what speakers can say, however, the sociolinguistic interpretation of what they do say in the spontaneous interviews and recordings is rendered more reliable and revealing.

In the conclusion, some of the theoretical implications and methodological difficulties involved in extending the use of repeated recordings and elicited intuitions in sociolinguistic surveys more generally are discussed. (Sociolinguistic survey methodology, variation, style, implicational scaling, creoles)

This study investigates the employment in modern Hebrew of an element having a lexical source involving comparison (k(e)-, ‘like’) that has proliferated over the past decade or so in Israel; ke′ilu ‘like’, lit. ‘as if’. The data come from audio recordings of casual conversations of college-educated Israelis with their friends and relatives, totaling approximately 78 minutes of talk among 72 speakers, transcribed in full and segmented into intonation units. A qualitative analysis of talk-in-interaction reveals four nonliteral functions of this expression: hedging, self-rephrasal, focus-marking, and quotation. A quantitative perspective on the distribution of these functions is presented, and these qualitative and quantitative analyses lead to an examination of the functional itinerary of this word in Hebrew discourse. A comparison with two “equivalents” of ke′ilu, English like and French genre leads to a discussion of functional parallelism across languages and yields further support for Hopper's principle of “persistence” in grammaticization. (Hebrew talk-in-interaction, grammaticization, cross-language pragmatics, discourse particles, hedging, self-rephrasal, focus-marking, quotatives.)* In memory of Suzanne Fleischman

In Italy, barzellette are short funny stories that speakers perform in various social events with large groups of friends, relatives, or colleagues. In Northern Italy, where a strong anti-immigration platform has been implemented by two influential political parties of the Veneto region, barzellette are performed to represent certain immigrant groups, especially the so-called extracomunitari. In this article, I examine the performative power of multidialectal language play in race-based humor through an analysis of two such joking events. I show how Veneto speakers perform barzellette in their local language, Veneto dialect, to mock immigrant voices, using approaches that purport, not necessarily in a deliberate fashion, to ‘contain’ or ‘conceal’ their racist remarks in their local code. In this way, they sharpen an exclusionary divide between an ‘us’, as insiders, as the local speakers of this language, and a ‘them’, as outsiders, or the immigrant ‘others’, who do not share this code. I thus examine issues of covert racist discourse within an ‘unmarked’ framework in which race and racializing discourses are embedded in social and cultural patterns. (Code-shifting, jokes, Lega Nord, migration, race, racialized discourse, Veneto dialect)*

Exploring contemporary Aymara and Quechua speakers' engagements with multilingualism, this article examines two transnational sites of Indigenous language use in Bolivia—a master's program in bilingual intercultural education in Cochabamba and a hip hop collective in El Alto. Responding to the call for a sociolinguistics of globalization that describes and interprets mobile linguistic resources, speakers, and markets, we draw on long-term ethnographic fieldwork to explore the transnational nature of these mobile and globalized sites, ideologies of Indigenous language and identity present there, and flexible language practices therein. From our analysis of selected narratives and interactions observed and recorded between 2004 and 2009, we argue that these sites, ideologies, and language practices constitute productive spaces for Indigenous language speakers to intervene in a historically and enduringly unequal, globalizing world. (Indigeneity, mobility, translanguaging, flexible language practices, multilingual repertoire, global hip hop)*

This article presents a quantitative variationist analysis of the English restrictive relative pronouns. However, where previous research has largely focused on language-internal explanations for variant choice, the focus here is the social meaning of this erstwhile syntactic variable. We uncover rich sociolinguistic embedding of the relative pronouns in standard, urban speech. The only productive wh- form is who, which continues to pattern as a prestige form centuries after its linguistic specialization as a human subject relative. This legacy of prestige is reflected not only in the social characteristics of those with whom it is associated, but also in the patterns of accommodation that are visible in its use. These findings simultaneously demonstrate the tenacious nature of social meaning and the enduring effects of grammatical ideology, both of which influence pronoun choice in the context of face-to-face interaction. (Restrictive relative pronouns, who, change from above, age-grading, prestige, accommodation)*

This study examines how speakers on certain TV interview programs resolve problems of agreement with formally singular epicene antecedents. The form most frequently used is they, although he does appear fairly often. Some forms found in written English hardly occur. It appears that they is not used simply to avoid a commitment to gender. Rather, three factors appear to contribute to speakers' choice of pronominal: presuppositions about gender roles associated with the referent, notional number of the referent, and the extent to which the referent can be posited as a specific individual. The idea that there is a gap in third person singular pronouns in spoken English is criticized. (Pronominal gender, agreement, semantics, usage, English)

Socialization is defined as the incorporation of a child into society on the basis of social and linguistic interaction. Central to this process is a child's advancement in communicative skills. As a child progresses in linguistic competence, the structure of interaction changes to accommodate his newfound skills, and underlying these changes are the Luo attitudes and beliefs on child-rearing, language acquisition, and the position of children in society. (Socialization; speech acquisition; social interaction; language attitudes.)

This article examines how a group of Tanzanian journalists employ various tactics of intersubjectivity to achieve mutual understanding during a conversation at work. The analysis focuses on one particularly challenging episode of talk wherein political figures and clothing styles from the early days of African independence are referenced, and an ensuing joke about body image is made using the phrase kumaintain figure ‘to maintain figure’ in reference to a male journalist. The joke arguably (re)appropriates the original meaning of the phrase and challenges the relevance of Western body aesthetics for Africans. All participants laugh at the joke, but the basis for their laughter is ambiguous. The participants' interpretations of the joke are examined through ethnographic methods within the framework of (re)entextualization (Silverstein & Urban 1996). The analysis shows that the participants have produced somewhat different indexical orders (Silverstein 2003) for the phrase and, therefore, have different reasons for finding it humorous.