This article is concerned with understanding and analyzing the role of the individual in Navajo poetry performances, in particular, three performances of putatively the same poem by the Navajo poet Laura Tohe. One performance is the written orthographic poem, and the other two are oral performances that have been recorded and analyzed. It is argued that a focus on the individual performer and on multiple performances can provide insight into the relationship between social constructions of self and identity within the constraints and opportunities particular media and contexts provide. It also reveals the importance of studying individual creativity in language and culture research.I would like to thank Andy Hofling, Barbara Johnstone, David Samuels, and Laura Tohe for comments on various versions of this article. Jonathan Hill, as usual, has been a sounding board for many of the ideas that finally found their way into this article. Thanks also to Jane Adams for some useful advice at a critical moment. I also want to thank Elizabeth Keating, Scott Rushforth, Joel Sherzer, Pauline Turner Strong, and Anthony Woodbury for comments on a much earlier draft. The research for this study was made possible by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the University of Texas at Austin. I want to thank the Navajo Nation for granting me a permit to do research on the emergence of poetry on the Navajo Nation. Thanks also to Leighton Peterson for his help during fieldwork. I also want to thank all the Navajo poets who allowed me to record and interview them. I further want to thank the various people of the Navajo Nation who in one way or another aided in my research. Views expressed in this article are my responsibility, as are any mistakes that remain.

This article describes discursive processes by which inhabitants of the Congolese border town Goma attribute new indexical values to Lingala, a language exogenous to the area of which most Goma inhabitants only possess limited knowledge. This creative reconfiguration of indexicalities results in the emergence of three “indexicalities of the second order”: the indexing of (i) being a true Congolese, (ii) toughness (based on Lingala's association with the military), and (iii) urban sophistication (based on its association with the capital Kinshasa). While the last two second-order reinterpretations are also widespread in other parts of the Congolese territory, the first one, resulting in the emergence of a Lingala as an “indexical icon” of a corresponding “language community,” deeply reflects local circumstances and concerns, in particular the sociopolitical volatility of the Rwandan-Congolese borderland that renders publicly affirming one's status as an “autochthonous” Congolese pivotal for assuring a livelihood and at times even personal security. (Lingala, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Goma, orders of indexicality, language community, autochthony, Kiswahili)*

This article analyzes how English medium of instruction (EMI) policy is implemented by disciplining teachers’ and students’ language behaviors in school spaces. I adopt Foucault's (1977) ‘discipline’ to examine how schools exercise disciplinary power to create an English-only environment in multilingual classroom contexts. The data is drawn from an ethnographic study of EMI policies in two Nepali schools. The findings of the study show that schools exercise their disciplinary power through both panoptic and post-panoptic surveillance strategies to police their students’ and teachers’ language practices and punish them for speaking the languages other than English. Such disciplinary power is reinforced by neoliberal development ideology that legitimizes linguistic and symbolic capitals of English. While enforcing EMI policies, schools craft students’ identity as disciplined English-speaking subjects who are perceived to contribute to development ideology. The article discusses some major impacts that sociolinguists can make on transforming unequal EMI language policies and practices. (Discipline, English medium of instruction (EMI), language policing)*

The sociolinguistic survey of Cayo District, British Honduras, is planned as one of a series to be carried out by the same methods and as far as possible by the same team, so that comparable results can be obtained from a number of territories, and hypotheses about the relationship between patterns of verbal behaviour and other social factors based on one territory tested in the next. The hypotheses to be tested were formed (somewhat pretentiously) within a general ‘law’ with four riders in ‘Problems of description in multilingual communities’ (Le Page 1968a), and the practical ends of the survey also adumbrated there — viz., to help improve the quality of education in multilingual communities by illuminating the problems, the motives and the performance of children, by training the teachers and by helping in a basic way with the preparation of materials. The scientific aims are to gain an understanding of linguistic processes in relation to other relevant factors and modes of behaviour, so as to improve both linguistic and sociolinguistic theory.

Literature on language death offers abundant information on the grammatical, phonological, lexical, and sociolinguistic processes that a dying speech form can undergo. However, work remains to be done in the area of narrative skills and performance. This article examines the creative manipulation of certain narrative devices, including bilingual lexical resources from modern Greek and Tosk Albanian in stories offered by a residual group of fluent Albanian speakers in Greece. In a community, which is highly variable from the point of view of the allocation of its Arvanítika (Albanian) linguistic and sociolinguistic skills to various population segments, fluent speakers manage to achieve a significant performance breakthrough by foregrounding and evaluating information important for their attitude building and vital to their social existence. Narrative performances become ways of relating historical events and past experiences in present-day life. The article makes the point that in studies of language death a more intensive use of the ethnography of speaking paradigm can be of great value for the detection of sensitive areas of speech behavior and change. (Narrative performance, language death, ethnography of speaking, Balkan sociolinguistics, Tosk Albanian, Greek)

St. Barthélemy, a small island in the northeastern Caribbean, is populated primarily by descendants of 17th century French settlers, and hosts seven language varieties. To explain the linguistic complexity of the island, this article reconstructs both its social history (using censuses, church records, and land registries) and its economic history, analyzing the effects of economic change on the island's population. The two offshoot communities on St. Thomas provide evidence of social fragmentation related to occupational differences. Functional explanations for St. Barth's linguistic diversity are inadequate; however, the social network theory of Milroy & Milroy 1992 proves useful in explaining the persistence of language differences in this small isolated community. (Social networks, life-modes, economic change, societal multilingualism, creole languages, French, West Indies, St. Barthélemy)

While interest in affective processes has led to an affective turn in cultural studies, in sociolinguistics this perspective has been given less attention. This study takes up the ‘lens of affect’ and directs it on two cases exemplifying the circulation of minoritised languages in new media spaces: music video covers from two minority-language contexts, Irish and Sámi, uploaded on YouTube. Combining recent theorising on affect with insights from sociolinguistic research, the study investigates how the YouTube users’ affective investments contribute to a (re)evaluation of the two minoritised languages, their speakers, and the related ethnic/national belongings, and how these investments are expressions of more or less banal nationalism, connected to the colonial histories of Ireland and Finland. The study illustrates how the social media operate as a catalyst of affective investments involved in an ethnolinguistic (re)ordering of languages and their speakers, at the intersection of ‘banal globalisation’ and ‘everyday nationalism’. (Minority languages, affect, discourse, social media, nationalism)*

This study provides a linguistic perspective on the structure and the interpretation of a key historical narrative in Umpithamu (a Pama-Nyungan language of Cape York Peninsula, Australia), against the background of a larger corpus of narrative texts in Umpithamu. The analysis focuses on the role of participant tracking devices in the macro-structure of the narrative, and the role of case marking in the build-up of narrative motifs. It is argued not only that marked types of participant tracking serve to mark the boundaries of episodes, as often noted in the literature, but also that some types have additional functions within episodes, which leads to a proposal for refinement of Fox's (1987) Principle of Morphosyntactic Markedness. On a micro-structural level, it is shown how a rare system of case marking is used by the narrator to construe white–Aboriginal interactions as events in which the Aboriginal participants experience an extreme lack of control.The first author would like to thank Mrs. Florrie Bassani and Ms. Joan Liddy, who so patiently taught him about their language, their life, and their history, and Bruce Rigsby, who introduced him to the Lamalama people and generously shared his earlier recordings of Umpithamu and his vast knowledge of Princess Charlotte Bay languages. Fieldwork on Umpithamu was sponsored by the Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders, which funded two research stays at the University of Melbourne, and the Australian Department of Communication, IT and the Arts (DCITA), which funded another fieldtrip. Many thanks to Nick Evans and the Department of Linguistics in Melbourne for hosting the first author's stays, and to Clair Hill for organizing the DCITA grant. A previous version of this article was presented at the 2nd European Workshop on Australian Aboriginal Languages in Somlószőlős, and at a workshop on Australian Aboriginal Narrative at the Max Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik. We would like to thank the members of the audience, especially Nick Enfield, Nick Evans, Clair Hill, Judit Horváth, Danièle Klapproth, Stephen Levinson, Bill McGregor, Adam Saulwick, Gunter Senft, Peter Sutton, and Michael Walsh, for very useful comments. We are also grateful to the reviewers and the editor for very detailed comments on a previous version.

In this article I focus on the formation and evaluation of chronotopes in social media. More specifically, I analyze the case of a ‘chronotope of the balcony performance’ that emerged in Italy in 2020 during the Covid-19 lockdown. The corpus of the study is constituted by 125 top postings resulting from a Twitter search based on the words Italy, lockdown, and balcony. In line with other scholars (see Goebel 2020), I argue that chronotopes in mass-mediated environments are formed through repetition and recycling of the same or similar semiotic material. I show how in social media expanded participation and the use of trans-semiotic and trans-medial resources ensure wide circulation of images and texts. I also point to the central role of stance taking by users in the constitution of the chronotope as a cultural object, particularly through generalizations and upscaling. (Chronotopes, Covid-19, discourse circulation, stance, scales)*

This study investigates the diffusion and structural adaptation of quotative be like into a rural African American speech community. The data come from a longitudinal corpus of recordings (1988–2010) with rural African American Vernacular English (AAVE) speakers born between 1894–2002. Previous research suggests other innovative AAVE features have diffused into this community from neighboring urban areas (Cukor-Avila 1995, 2001; Cukor-Avila & Bailey 1995b, 1996) approximately a generation after they appear in urban varieties. The present analysis supports Cukor-Avila (2002) that be like has followed a similar path of diffusion, and adds new recordings of young speakers to provide necessary data to explore the transmission of be like in the community, its continued diffusion, and how these processes reinforce each other as be like becomes the primary means of expressing quoted speech. In addition, the present study explores how quotative be like has been structurally adapted into the AAVE copula system. (AAVE, transmission, diffusion, adaptation, quotative be like)*

The conservatism of modern Icelandic is a bromide so well worn that it is refreshing now and then to be reminded that Icelandic has in fact changed from that Old Norwegian which the settlers brought with them in the ninth century, and that it is not, in the words of a recent writer, ‘eine versteinerte Sprachform’ (Décsy 1973: 48). One striking change, which involves phonological, morphological, syntactic, and sociolinguistic problems, is that of the dual and plural pronouns of the first and second persons. Succinctly stated: ON vit ‘we’ dual and pit ‘you’ dual have become við ‘we’ plural and pið ‘you’ plural, while ON vér ‘we’ plural and pér ‘you’ plural have become ‘we’ honorific and ‘you’ honorific. A systematic shift of meaning has affected both pronouns, eliminating the dual meaning in favor of the plural, and the plural in favor of the honorific singular.

This article addresses recent calls in sociolinguistics to accommodate the agentive role of material objects in communicative interactions. The study explores how agency is shared between humans and objects, and how the latter may influence and shape the semiotic repertoires in a professional interaction. We adopt interactional sociolinguistics to analyze video recordings from the research group meetings (RGM) of a team of multinational microbiologists in a midwestern American university to demonstrate how the door plays an important role in the RGM genre of discourse. The door serves as a contextualization cue for the opening and composition of the interaction, indexes the participant identities, constructs the interactional space into an ‘ecological huddle’, and frames the ‘professional vision’ by bringing into salience the relevant semiotic resources, footing, participation frameworks, and ethos. (Objects, embodied sociolinguistics, interactional sociolinguistics, ecological huddle, research group meetings)*

This article investigates sexual and gender ideologies in online dating profiles of Sebian gay men using corpus-linguistic and discourse-analytic methods. Selected keywords are analysed in context, and particular attention is paid to collocation patterns, including grammatical collocates that are shown to carry discursive relevance beyond style. The analysis reveals that repeated associations centre on concepts of masculinity and normality, in a local indexical order of ‘proper’ manhood, sexuality, global modernity, and national identity. Overall, the texts are most strongly characterized by adversarial distance towards certain gay men, operating in normalizing assimilation to the national (heterosexual) citizen ideal. A broader mechanism, termed recursive normalisation, is described as underpinning the observed patterns. The findings are further discussed as highlighting the pitfalls of theory and social movements focused on social assimilation, arguing for the need for further queer linguistic deconstruction of the normalising discourses that intersect marginalized communities and broader, systemic hegemonies. (Gay men, online dating, masculinity, recursive normalization)

Mental categorization schemes, such as noun classification systems, can be productive sites for examining how experience is meaningfully and culturally structured through metaphorical and metonymic associations. Pohnpeian possessive classifiers not only constitute cultural categories of rank and power relations, but dynamically re-sort or re-classify these categories through honorific speech. Linguistic and interactional data are here combined with ethnographic data about Pohnpeian society and cultural beliefs, particularly notions about the meaning and construction of ranked social relationships, to show how micro-interactions which index status are linked both to larger cultural ideologies about power and, metaphorically, to the experiential domain. (Pohnpei, Micronesia, honorifics, status, metaphor, possessive constructions)

I shall argue that adoption of linguistics at institutions of higher learning in its present international disciplinary form, and in its expression through the medium of English (because English is a major foreign or second language in much of the world and the by far dominant language for the discipline of linguistics), can be contrary to the public good in less developed countries (LDCs) and emerging speech communities. Linguistics in its current international disciplinary form serves needs different from those of emerging speech communities, where a new language treatment system ought to be created by a new cadre of caretakers of the community's language resources. (Language planning; developing countries; linguistics as an international discipline; English)

This article documents discursive and social change currently taking place in contemporary Hong Kong during the transitional period leading up to the change of sovereignty from Britain to China. It does so by means of a detailed analysis of a political meeting, involving the British Hong Kong governor, Chris Patten, and members of the Hong Kong public. The meeting took place in October, 1992, a day after Patten introduced proposals to widen the democratic franchise. Patten used the meeting, the first time a Hong Kong governor had made himself openly accountable to the public at large, to demonstrate the sort of democratic discourse for which the reform proposals were designed to create a framework.

The analysis focuses on two main ways Patten highlighted the democratic nature of the discourse: the use of mise en abyme, or a “play within a play” structure, and the downplaying of overt markers of hierarchy and power asymmetry. Although Patten's aim was to demonstrate openness and accountability, his ultimate control of the discourse belied the democratic agenda he ostensibly promoted. The analysis consequently also focuses on the manipulative dimension of Patten's discourse. The conclusion considers to what extent the meeting might mark a real shift to a more democratic order of public discourse in Hong Kong. (Discourse analysis, power and language, social change, indexicals, involvement, manipulative discourse, mise en abyme, order of discourse, political discourse, turn-taking).

‘Arabrew’ denotes a mixture of the languages that index two nations known for their seemingly intractable conflict. It is supposedly spoken by Palestinians and other Arabs who are citizens of Israel. Evidence from the field gathered in 2015 shows some codeswitching, especially inter-sentential, and borrowing, mostly of nouns for specialist terminology, and of a few discourse markers. This does not support the claim that a new variety has emerged, yet the debate around it channels concerns about nonlinguistic issues relating to the political economy of Israel and to anxieties about Israeli-Palestinian relations. This debate invokes ideologies, including language ideologies, of nationalism, colonialism, liberalism, and more, that are identifiably linked to the historical and material contexts. The study uses critical discourse analysis and contact linguistics to outline the articulation between distinctions of national identity, socioeconomic class, the way people speak, and the way this speech is ideologically received. (Arabic, Hebrew, codeswitching, ideology)*

Marketing research shows that organizations tailor communication for particular customer ‘segments’, but little is known about the live design of interaction for different categories. To investigate this, we examine telephone calls to a holiday sales call-centre (for ‘seniors’) and a university admissions call-centre (for ‘young’ students). While topically different, call-takers in both datasets requested callers’ email addresses in order to progress service. Using conversation analysis, we examine how these requests were designed, where and how ‘age’ was made relevant, and how subsequent service provision was handled in a way that matched callers’ presumed age categories. Contrastive to the static notion of ‘segments’, we show how recipient design is bound up with categorial considerations while being responsive to the live unfolding of actual interaction. The article demonstrates how a comparative collection-based approach can be used to analyse the relevance of social categories in situations where this is implicit or ambiguous. (Membership categorization, customer segmentation, conversation analysis, recipient design, requests, age)*