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 article focuses on the question of how systems of expectations for social conduct develop in a context characterized by diversity and transience. The empirical focus is a series of women's neighborhood meetings in a transient urban milieu in Indonesia. Drawing on work on semiotic register formation, I argue that expectations for social conduct within this neighborhood are constructed through the positioning of self and others in talk across speech situations. In doing so, I explore interdiscursive relationships between this conversational activity and more perduring signs of personhood and social relations. (Enregisterment, identity, Indonesia, migration, trust)*

A crucial division of linguistic labor is that among metalinguistic labors. Who is authorized to speak about language, how, and where? Language ideologies not only ascribe different functions to different languages; they also ascribe different sorts of metadiscourse to speakers of (or about) those languages. Drawing from archival and field work, this article traces the ways particular Soviet and post-Soviet institutions and actors modeled and regimented metapragmatic discourses, specifically through stage and screen practices and representations that hypercontextualized utterances in Romani. They became so hegemonic that, in public arenas, Romani speakers spoke only about nonreferential functions; only in less well broadcast contexts (and mainly with other Roma) did they articulate metalinguistic and metareferential discourses. These practices reverse and contrast with the mainstream metapragmatics of Russian. Language ideologies commonly rank codes and metadiscourses; this case illuminates not only that they do so, but also how they do so, and it suggests what their social effects may be.

Despite recent advances (e.g. Cheshire 2007; Pichler 2010; Denis 2015), discourse-pragmatic variables continue to challenge variationist theory and methods. An overarching dilemma concerns multifunctionality, raising difficulties for semantic equivalency and the circumscription of the variable context. In this article we present a case study to illustrate that deconstructing a discourse-pragmatic marker into its composite parts reveals clear criteria for disambiguating its principal function and its contextually derived functions. The discussion centres on the pragmatic marker eh in Canadian English. We illustrate that its multifunctionality is derivable from four parts: principal function, syntactic context, prosodic context, and discourse context. Our deconstruction uses a two-pronged methodology, drawing on storyboard elicitation and sociolinguistic interview data, which mutually reinforce our theoretical arguments. Under this transdisciplinary lens, the exponents of form and function become predictable, constrainable, and systematically derivable for probabilistic modelling within and across speech communities. (Confirmationals, multifunctionality, pragmatic markers, eh, speech acts)*

The choice of English directive variants has been hypothesized by ErvinTripp (1976, 1977) to be determined by several social and ecological factors: the relative social ranks of the speaker and recipient, their ages, their familiarity, the presence or absence of outsiders, territorial location, and task expectations. The major goal of this investigation is to test ErvinTripp's hypotheses concerning the relationship between these variables and the choice of the identified syntactically based directive variants (imperatives, imbedded imperatives, need statements), using a distinctly different sample: a predominantly black male migratory agricultural labor population in the United States's eastern seaboard region. The data indicate that the imperative form is used almost exclusively in those contexts where the syntactically based directive variants were expected to occur. Thus, most of the predictions derived from Ervin-Tripp's model for these directive variants were contradicted. The preference for imperatives is suggested to be largely a consequence of the antagonistic relationships within the migrant farm-worker community. The results of this study also suggest that the set of decision rules used in choosing among directive variants according to social criteria is a function of the following factors: crosscultural (i.e., social class and ethnic) variation, and social and physical characteristics of the interaction setting. (Directives, migrant farmworkers, cultural differences, environmental influences, ethology)

Recent scholarship on the working of racial formation processes underscores the intersection between discursive and structural components in the emergence of “race,” and the agency of individuals at the local and global level in articulating its meaning. This article offers a link toward understanding how racial formation processes operate in face-to-face interaction, by highlighting how people do racialization. Based on fieldwork in Italy, it explores how conversationalists deploy agreement to co-construct a racialized image of immigrants to Italy. It is argued that this deployment leads to reinforcement of the racist stances expressed in the conversation itself, and possibly beyond it. In addition, the repeated occurrence of agreement during the co-construction of utterances produces a spiral effect around racializing discourse, a progressive deepening of the racialization itself. At the same time, agreement leads to a decrease of personal responsibility for the statements made, which come to be co-constructed among conversationalists. (Agreement, racialization, immigration, Italy)

This article investigates signage in the linguistic landscape of Toronto that is addressed to Hungarian-speaking Roma asylum applicants, focusing on multilingual public-order signs that convey warnings or prohibitions. Such signs are produced by institutional agents who often use machine translation (Google Translate), yielding ungrammatical texts in ostensible Hungarian. Drawing on ethnographic interviews, the article explores the indexicalities that such multilingual signs have for different groups of participants, including Roma addressees and English-speaking ‘overreaders’. While institutions may view the production of multilingual signs as indexical of open-mindedness towards migrants, Roma interviewees may see public-order signs as indexing racial stereotypes by presupposing deviant behavior, and may view ungrammaticality as indexing an unwillingness to engage in face-to-face interaction. (Multilingualism, Canada, Gypsies (Roma), linguistic landscapes, Hungarian, machine translation, indexicality)

The American performance artist Lady Gaga has earned great notoriety in the mainstream media through artistic and personal performance, as well as for her relationships both with her fandom and the media. In this article, I discuss the linguistic stance-taking moves that Lady Gaga uses in two different communicative media in order to construct an authentic celebrity persona. Through references to intimate relationships, inclusive plural pronouns, and demonstration of attention to fan conversations, Lady Gaga's Twitter posts create a stance of alignment with the ‘ordinary’ people in her fan base. Conversely, by using combative and corrective rhetorical strategies in interviews with journalists, she creates a stance of disalignment with mass media establishment. Together, these linguistic strategies allow Lady Gaga's claims to authenticity to be seen as morally credible. This work highlights the central role that language plays in constructing an authentic-seeming public persona. (Authenticity, stance, celebrity, Lady Gaga, media, interview, Twitter)*

Since forming contacts with international Deaf associations promoting an ethnolinguistic model of Deafness, members of Nepal's Deaf associations define Deafness by competence in Nepali Sign Language rather than audiological status. By analyzing the ideological and interactional processes through which homesigners are incorporated into Nepali Deaf social life, this article explores the effects of local beliefs about the nature of language, personhood, and competence on this model of Deafness. Due to former linguistic isolation, many homesigners are constrained in their ability to acquire Nepali Sign Language and, in social contexts where ideological conceptions of language use highlight individual competencies, would not be included in a Deaf social category. However, Nepali conceptions of socially distributed personhood contribute to a focus on the dialogically emergent dimensions of semiosis. As a result, recognition as a competent signer in this context can depend less on individual cognitive ability than on social collaboration. (d/Deaf, sign language, competence, language ideologies)*

Although there exists an extensive literature on mediation, little attention has been given to the close analysis of talk in actual mediations. This article applies various analytic techniques, particularly those of conversation analysis and sociolinguistics, to provide a culturally contexted account of a mediation. At issue is the division of a rice harvest between a sharecropper and the owner of a ricefield in a Northern Thai village. Practices with regard to accusation and criticism, defense and denial, expression of anger, formulation of parties, and perspectival shifting are central to the analysis.

In order to understand what is taking place, it is necessary to have some knowledge of a variety of cultural and “contextual” matters, for example, genres and styles of local speech, traditional and current share-cropping practices, the national law regarding sharecropping, and local administrative practices, as well as the history of relations between the parties to the negotiation. On the other hand, a close analysis of the talk reveals a good deal about general cultural contexts, as well as about Northern Thai mediation. (Mediation, conversation analysis, Thailand)

The spread of English has created a rich array of varieties, which are often grouped into a tripartite division: the ENL, ESL, and EFL of Quirk, or the inner-circle, outer-circle, and expanding-circle of Kachru. These varieties, especially ESL, differ among themselves in both form and function. It is often assumed in the literature that these varieties are autonomous systems of communication. This article challenges this assumption by showing that the innovative phonological features of one ESL variety, the vernacular English spoken in Singapore, cannot be analyzed without reference to native English. These change-in-progress features fall into two types: those that originate in phonemes, and those that originate in words. Social stigma associated with them poses a formidable barrier to their stabilization and diffusion, and consequently to their autonomization. Nonnative English is grammatically dependent on native English.

This article sketches the effects of 100 years of missionary presence on how people in the San Carlos Apache community regard language and the idea of a “language expert.” Evangelical Christian practice demands an Apache language emptied of all indexical associations with non-Christian Apache cultural practices. The reservation is home to perhaps two dozen missions and churches, each of which takes a slightly different view of the role of Apache language and culture in religious practice. In an exploration of the translation practices of Phillip Goode, a San Carlos Apache interpreter, and of early Lutheran missionaries on the reservation, it is argued that Bible translation is a key factor in shifting ideas about language as a purely referential system on the reservation. This shifting language ideology has repercussions on how people in the community consider the prospects for language revitalization.This article was delivered in earlier versions to anthropology colloquia at Yale University, at Hamilton College, and at the University of Massachusetts. I thank Joseph Errington, Bernard Bate, Harold Conklin, Eleanor Nevins, Bonnie Urciuoli, Enoch Page, Jacqueline Urla, and Roy Wright, both for helping to arrange the presentations and for their generous critiques of the content. Willem de Reuse offered cogent comments and morphosyntactic advice. James Wilce gave careful comments on two versions of the manuscript. Thanks to Jane Hill and Barbara Johnstone, as well as the anonymous reviewers from this journal, for their splendid and productive advice. I also heartily thank the teachers and staff of the St. Charles Elementary School, Peridot Lutheran Day School, and Rice Elementary School for their insights and assistance in the preparation of this essay. As always I remain grateful to the Goode family for their continued friendship and encouragement. All errors and omissions remain my own.

This article employs conversation analysis to investigate the role of adverbials in Japanese talk-in-interaction for the projection of further talk and some implications this has for interactional styles. Through examination of naturally occurring talk, it is first observed that a typical usage of adverbials is in some position preceding the predicate, although they are also appended as post-predicate additions. Second, when adverbials are produced prior to a predicate, evidently they can strongly project a forthcoming predicate within the particular interactional context. Given the importance of predicates within Japanese turns, adverbials have a major part to play, not only in assisting participants to foreshadow a probable unfolding of an utterance, but also to enable recipients to achieve early alignment with emerging talk and to expedite the implementation of subsequent actions. These features are shown to be a powerful resource in the facilitation of seemingly implicit styles of communication.

This article argues for a focus on affect in sociolinguistic style. I integrate recent scholarship on affective practice (Wetherell 2015) and the circulation of affective value (Ahmed 2004b) in order to situate the linguistic and bodily semiotics of affect as components of stylistic practice. At a Bay Area public arts high school, ideologically distinct affects of chill or high-energy are co-constructed across signs and subjects. I analyze a group of cisgender young men's use of creaky voice quality, speech rate, and bodily hexis in enacting and circulating these affective values. Crucially, affect co-constructs students’ positioning within the high school political economy (as college-bound or not, artistically driven or not), highlighting the ideological motivations of stylistic practice. Building on recent scholarship, I propose that a more thorough consideration of affect can deepen our understanding of meaning-making as it occurs in everyday interaction in institutional settings. (Affect, political economy, embodiment, bricolage, voice quality, speech rate, high school)

This article focuses on what we define as scalar intimacy in the stories people tell about their embodied experience as sociohistorical beings. Our analysis, based on ethnographic studies in Northern Italy (Perrino) and Beijing, China (Pritzker), examines the ways in which speech participants draw upon various discursive strategies to ‘zoom in’ and ‘pan out’ of both time and space, placing themselves and their activities in relation to various people, ideologies, and practices. Scalar intimacy, we argue, provides a novel framework for understanding the multiple ways in which people use language to scale their embodied experience in relation to culturally situated ideas and forms. Scalar intimacy thus extends the study of scales and fractal recursivity in linguistic anthropology and sociolinguistics. It also contributes to scholarship focusing on how culturally situated meanings are reproduced and challenged over time through specific interactions. (China, chronotope, identity, intimacy, narrative, Northern Italy, scales)*

This article examines the influence of language ecology on bilingual speech. It is based on first-hand data from two previously undocumented varieties of Romani and Pomak in contact with Turkish in Greek Thrace; in both cases Turkish is an important language for the community's identity. This analysis shows how the Romani-Turkish “fused lect” was produced by intensive and extensive bilingualism through colloquial contact with the trade language, Turkish. In addition, it shows how semi-sedentary Pomak speakers had limited, institutional contact with Turkish, resulting in more traditional codeswitching and emblematic lexical borrowings. (Language contact, bilingual speech, fused lect, language ecology, Pomak, Romani, Turkish, Greece)*

This article offers discourse analysis of young transgender people's interaction, in which they describe being rendered powerless through misgendering or misrepresentation. It argues that the young people's collective responses to these moments enable them to challenge the ideologies underpinning their marginalisation, and to recontextualise the language used by others to describe their bodies. Stance-taking, the production of affect, and constructed dialogue are shown to be key tools in their production of an agentive, mutual identity. The article thus provides close analysis of dialogic embodiment, a process by which the body is quite literally spoken into being. By critiquing the cisnormative structures which inform and enable the young people's marginalisation, the article responds to the call for a trans linguistics (Zimman 2020) and reflects upon the author's positionality as a cisgender researcher. (Embodiment, affective stance, agency, trans identity, cisnormativity, trans linguistics)*

A theoretical framework is presented to account for various means of indirect verbal communication used by the Baatombu of northern Benin to accomplish face-threatening acts, and a particular technique involving dog names is discussed. By carefully choosing a proverbial name for a puppy, the owner can then, simply by calling the dog, convey a message meant either for a particular neighbor or for anyone who hears it and feels concerned by its content. This diplomatic way of expressing oneself when a difference arises is doubly indirect: (a) The dog's owner makes use of a pseudo-addressee (the dog), and (b) the message is formulated with a proverb, therefore with words of which the owner is not the author. (Animal names, Africa, communicative acts, ethnography of speaking, indirectness, politeness, speech acts)

This study investigates the construction of political identity in the 2011–2012 US Republican presidential primary debates. Focusing on candidates’ self-introductions, I analyze how candidates use references to family members and roles to frame their political identities or ‘presidential selves’. Family references are shown to (i) frame candidates’ personal identities as family men/women; (ii) interweave the spheres of home and politics and consequently, their private and public selves; (iii) serve as a tool of discursive one-upmanship in self-introduction sequences; and (iv) demonstrate intimate familiarity and expertise on the topic of national security. This study extends research on family discourse and identity by examining the rhetorical function of mentioning family-related identities in explicitly persuasive public discourse, and contributes to sociolinguistic research on political discourse by examining how family identities serve as a resource for framing political identities. (Discourse analysis, framing, family, identity, political discourse, presidential debates, sequentiality)

This article has two purposes. The first is to examine the relationship between topic and gender on the basis of observation of naturally occurring conversations among all-male, all-female, and mixed gender groups. The second is to undertake an analysis of the relative importance or triviality of these conversations as perceived by the conversants themselves. Several unexpected agreements and differences were found. (Sociolinguistics, conversational topic, gender-related language differences, intuition versus data-based investigation in the study of language, speech acts, English, United States)