The aim of this paper is twofold. First, the author wishes to suggest an evolutionary typology of languages (early modern, modern, contemporary, etc.) and to specify the position of present day Japanese on this evolutionary scale. Secondly, it suggests a way to integrate the concept of linguistic modernization with a theory of language problems, and shows that for modernization at least two types of processes, macro-modernization and micro-modernization, must be distinguished. The former concerns such tasks as the establishment of a modern national language and as far as Japan is concerned this process has been completed. The latter process concerns problems such as the individual's use of language. It still awaits its completion. (Sociolinguistic typology, language evolution, linguistic modernization, Japan.)

This article explores the concept of political diglossia, a phenomenon arising in totalitarian or semitotalitarian countries, where the language of official propaganda gives rise to its opposite: the unofficial, underground language of antipropaganda. The author studies one semantic domain – the colloquial designations of the political police and security forces in contemporary Poland – and compares them with the official designations. The semantics of the relevant words and expressions is studied in great detail so that the social attitudes encoded in them can be revealed and rigorously compared. To achieve this, the author relies on the natural semantic metalanguage that she has developed over the last two decades, which has already been applied in the study of many other semantic domains, in many different languages. The social and political attitudes encoded in the Polish expressions referring to the security apparatus are discussed against the background of Poland's history. The author shows that language is not only the best “mirror of mind” (Leibniz) and “mirror of culture” and “guide to social reality” (Sapir), but also a mirror of history and politics. (Sociolinguistics, pragmatics, semantics, language of propaganda, expressive language)

The concept of the ‘new speaker’ has gained currency in the sociolinguistics of minority languages in the past decade, referring to individuals who have acquired an additional language outside of the home and who make frequent use of it in the course of their daily lives. Policymakers and language advocates in both Scotland and Canada make frequent reference to the role that new speakers may play in the future of the Gaelic language on both sides of the Atlantic, and Gaelic language teaching of various kinds has been prioritised by policymakers as a mechanism for revitalising the language. This article examines reflexes of this policy in the two countries, juxtaposing the ongoing fragility of Gaelic communities with new speaker discourses around heritage, identity, and language learning motivations. In particular, I consider Nova Scotian new speakers’ sense of identity as ‘Gaels’, an ethnonym largely avoided or problematised by Scottish new speakers. (Ethnolinguistic identity, heritage, language revitalisation, new speakers)*

Language has long been recognized as an important marker of ethnic identity. The identification is usually made in terms of some specific language or dialect, the use of which coincides more or less well with the boundaries of some particular ethnic group. This relationship obtains perfectly in present-day East Sutherland (Scotland), where the East Sutherland Gaelic mother tongue is almost the sole marker of fisherfolk ethnic identity. It can be shown, however, that this is only a very recent development and that the long-standing linguistic component of fisherfolk ethnicity is rather a lag in linguistic behavior vis-à-vis the rest of the population. The lag has taken four different forms over the past century or so, but the presence of such a lag is itself the actual ethnic marker. (Language and ethnicity, linguistic norms, language maintenance and shift; Scotland, Scottish Gaelic.)

Despite a shift to service-based economies, male-dominated, high-status workplaces have been the predominant focus of research into language and gender in the workplace. This study redresses this shortcoming by considering one female-dominated, low-status, highly regimented workplace that is emblematic of the globalized service economy: call centres. Drawing on 187 call centre service interactions, institutional documents, interviews, and observations from call centres in two national contexts, the study employs an innovative combination of quantitative and qualitative discourse-analytic techniques to compare rule compliance of male and female workers. Female agents in both national contexts are found to comply more with the linguistic prescriptions despite managers and agents emphatically denying the relevance of gender. The study offers a new perspective on language and gender, pointing to the need to expand the methodologies and theories currently favoured to understand how language perpetuates occupational segregation in twenty-first-century workplaces. (Call centres, language and gender, new perspectives, male/female differences, globalized service economy)*

Aligned with renewed commitments to class critique in sociolinguistics and discourse studies, I examine premium as a floating signifier. My initial semiotic landscape analysis demonstrates how this word is attached to any number of goods/services, coaxing people into a sense of distinction and superior status. These language games occur most vividly in my second analytic site—Premium Economy—where status is fabricated as tangibly but not too obviously distinct from Economy while preserving the prestige of Business. From a corpus of over forty international airlines’ promotional materials, I pinpoint three key rhetorics underpinning Premium Economy: extraction, excess, and comparison. My analysis locates premium as a quintessential form of symbolic violence (Bourdieu 1997/2000) deployed for controlling people by seducing, flattering, and enchanting them. The anxious bourgeoisie are thereby ‘joyfully enlisted’ (Lordon 2014) into the aspirational logics of elitism, all animated by the tenacious neoliberal ideologies of a supposedly post-class world. (Elite discourse, post-class ideology, floating signifiers, Frédéric Lordon ‘premium’, Premium Economy)*

This article discusses semiotic connections among linguistic prosody, the body, and forms of physical activity. A quantitative study of the instructional styles of bodybuilding and yoga instructors on YouTube shows that bodybuilding instructors employ faster articulation rates and higher pitch (F0) than yoga instructors. We argue that articulation rate and pitch become semiotically linked to notions of energy, and the differences in the instructors’ styles are rooted in differences in levels of embodied energy that bodybuilding and yoga are assumed to require. Instructors employ linguistic features that reflect these ideologies of their activities, and in doing so, present themselves as embodied instantiations of their respective practices. This study shows that ideologies of the body as a physically active doer of things provide an important source for the generation of iconic, energy-related meanings. Crucially, we show that ideological notions of energy and embodied iconicity can drive group-level patterns of linguistic variation. (Prosody, iconicity, style, embodiment, social meaning, ideology)*

This article demonstrates the ongoing, culturally situated and co-constructed nature of the translation of Chinese medicine from Chinese into English. Building upon scholarship in anthropology, sociolinguistics, and translation studies, this article contributes to the building of an anthropologically grounded theory of translation as an ongoing lived event, with implications far beyond the simple transfer of meaning from “source” to “target” languages. Through the examination of video and audio data collected over two years, I show how participants in classroom interactions at a southern California school of Chinese medicine not only interactively accomplish the work of translating specific Chinese terms, but also accomplish a great deal socially with such translation activity. Participants are thus shown to use translation as a platform for social positioning as well as a tool for socializing interlocutors into various notions of evidence and ideologies of language, both of which have implications for clinical decision-making in practice. (Translation, language ideologies, classroom interaction, Chinese medicine)*

This paper examines how Yucatec Mayan people conceive of conversations. Special attention is given to the role of narrator, respondent, and audience in those speech arts which utilize conversational genres. The conversational genres of ordinary talk, storytelling, and myth-telling in Yucatec Mayan are all dialogues. One field-recorded narrative is analyzed in detail in order to illustrate the distribution and scope of narrator and respondent speech. (Ethnography of speaking, Middle American native language use, discourse analysis, mythology and folklore performance.)

This article explores religious impact on language maintenance and language shift in two Hakka communities in Malaysia. While research has shown a trend towards language shift in these communities, whether religious institutions can play a role in heritage language maintenance remained unclear. The key findings are as follows: (i) language use patterns differ among various religious groups; (ii) this difference is due mainly to religious practices, that is, whether a heritage language is used as the ‘language of religion’; and (iii) most religious institutions, except Taoist temples and Basel churches, seem to fuel shifting. However, the tendency to move towards the ‘bi-language of religion’ threatens even the efforts of Basel churches. The study indicates interesting possibilities regarding religious impact but also shows, paradoxically, that the priority of Hakka-based religious institutions is to promote their religions, not to sustain the threatened heritage language. (Language maintenance, language shift, religious impact, Hakka Chinese community)*

Through an analysis of arguments in two different sets of university faculty meetings, this article attempts to demonstrate that episodes of conflict in Japanese can be treated as accomplishments at a local, interactional level. The analysis focuses on turn-taking organizations used by faculty member participants in two meetings to show how talk in one set of meetings was designed to facilitate the onset of arguments, while talk in the other set was constructed to discourage participants from exchanging statements of opposition; and that the organization of talk in the meetings, precisely because it either enabled or constrained the occurrence of arguments, was essential to the institutional work being accomplished by participants. Discussion of the analysis focuses on the tendency in research on Japanese discourse to treat conflict as an inherently disruptive phenomenon that needs to be accounted for in terms preestablished concepts such as harmony and social hierarchy.I want to express my appreciation to two anonymous reviewers for detailed comments and criticisms that were of tremendous help in revising this article. I also would like to thank Jack Bilmes, Dina R. Yoshimi, Jane Hill, and Yumiko Ohara for their valuable suggestions. In addition, I want to acknowledge the assistance of Takehiro Goto, Masaaki Hattori, Dai Kamimaru, and Toshiki Sato in gathering and transcribing the data. I alone am responsible for any errors which may remain.

This study is a sociophonetic investigation of dialect variation and change in the East African Asian community in Leicester, UK. The community differs from other strands of the British Asian diaspora because of its migration history: a two-stage journey (‘twice migration’) within a few generations, first from the Indian subcontinent to East Africa (late nineteenth century) and from there onward to Britain (early 1970s). We examine variation in the production of the foot, strut, and nurse vowels across two generations of East African Asian migrants with a focus on the usage of originally Indian English features, identity expression, changing sense of belonging, and desire to maintain the original culture from the East African homelands. Our sociolinguistic examination of the speakers’ migration history demonstrates that, despite a strong affiliation with East Africa, first-generation speakers have predominantly maintained Indian English patterns whereas second-generation subjects partake in accommodation to an (educated) variety of East Midlands English. (Twice migration, accommodation, identity, variation and change in the diaspora, foot, strut, and nurse vowels, Indian English, East African English, East Midlands English)*

This article is triggered by an analytic puzzle. In about half of a corpus of Korean telephone openings, callers produce a second summons, yeposeyyo, in the second turn of the opening sequence. The analysis unravels the interactional and organizational contingencies involved in the construction of the caller's second summons. It shows that the second summons operates as a vehicle for inviting recognition, and that the answerers overlay their work of recognition onto their talk in the third turn. In this way, the parties confront, work through, and display their underlying orientation to the organizational problem of establishing each other's identity in dealing with the second summons/answer sequence.An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in 2004. I would like to thank John Heritage, Manny Schegloff, and Sung-Ock Sohn for valuable comments on earlier drafts. Barbara Johnstone and two anonymous readers for this journal also gave helpful advice.

This paper introduces the theory of the lexical bar. It reports research studies conducted in England and Australia. A semantic barrier exists in the English lexicon that emerges from socio-historical factors and is reinforced by the socio-occupational orderings of contemporary society. This barrier separates the lexes of conservative peripheral social dialects from the lexes of dominant central dialects. It serves to produce differential attainment rates in education and to reproduce a social class-based division of labour in English-speaking societies. (Language and thought; language and knowledge; language and education; diachronic linguistics and the sociology of language; the lexes of social dialects; semantic field theory; measures of semantic complexity; the priority of words in meaning; history of English.)

This study of bilingual competence, linguistic attitudes, and language choice among secondary students in Valencia explores the effects of linguistic normalization since the removal of Franco's repressive measures against the Valencian language variety. The introduction of Valencian into the educational system and other measures have substantially reversed the decline of levels of competence and expanded its domains of usage but have only marginally decreased the dominance of Castilian. A survey of attitudes toward Valencian, Catalan (Barcelona variety) and Castilian reveals two distinct groups of patterns. One ascribes status and integrative value chiefly to Castilian, the other to Valencian and Catalan. Identifying the students manifesting the variants of these patterns according to socio-demographic, ideological, and behavioral factors shows how the current political dynamic between progressive nationalist forces and anti-Catalanist, Castilian-speaking forces is reflected in ongoing attitudinal divergence.Research was supported in part by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Sankoff is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and holds the Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Genomics.

In a combination of ethnohistorical records and longitudinal data gathered over a period of 30 years, the development of Solomon Islands Pijin is documented and analyzed in light of the current debate surrounding creolization theory. Using a pragmatic definition of a Creole (Jourdan 1991), the authors argue that pidgins can be very elaborate codes even before they become the mother tongue of children, and that this elaboration is the result of the linguistic creativity of adults. It is further shown that, in sociolinguistic niches where adults and children use the pidgin as their main language, the impact of the latter on the evolution of the language is of a different nature. (Creolization theory, pidgin languages, substrate influences, urbanization, Solomon Islands Pijin)

Dyirbal was probably originally spoken by about 5,000 people across its 10 dialects. In 1963, the northern dialects had just a few speakers (now all dead save one), but two southern dialects had formed a language community with several score speakers, including a number of children. Over the past quarter-century, younger people have switched to English, while among the older ones a new “merged dialect” has developed. The social situations and attitudes of speakers are described, in addition to changing language identifications. The writer has seen Dyirbal contract in lexical and grammatical complexity as it has moved toward an inevitable extinction. (Sociolinguistics, language death, Australian Aboriginal languages, field methods)

A particular factor in linguistic variation which has often been connected to female speech is politeness, as first described by Lakoff (1973a, 1973b), manifested not only by means of intonation, but also through the use of particular formulae of courtesy, through the use of tag questions at the end of interrogatives, and the use of longer, less direct and peremptory sentences.

A comparison is presented of Indian urban and rural sign languages of the deaf. The structures of both languages are designed for efficient communication but have developed differently in response to different sociolinguistic environments. The urban form transmits information primarily by means of appeal to a shared linguistic code; the rural form mainly by appeal to communal nonlinguistic knowledge. Both languages employ effective and appropriate means given their environments. The relationship between language usage and structure is explored. (Sign language, deafness, India)