This article investigates linguistic diversity, migration, and labour in the case of a nineteenth-century copper mine in the multilingual northern periphery of Norway. Taking a historical perspective on workplace multilingualism, it reveals the dynamic relationships between the economic interests and policy-making of an industrial enterprise and the political and sociolinguistic development in a multilingual region, at a time when national authorities introduced assimilation policies. Owned and managed by British industrialists, the mine recruited almost exclusively migrant workers to a remote fjord in the Norwegian periphery, many of them Kven from northern Finland and Sweden. In a multi-layered approach, the study sketches multilingual work practices, policy-making, and the discursive positioning of diversity, and explores the company's management of the relationships between capital, community, and nation-state. It reveals the company's flexible approach towards diversity governed by economic interest. (Workplace multilingualism, mining, Kven, Norway, historical)*

Some of the recent work in the field of media discourse has been concerned with various levels in the organization and structure of audience participation programs on radio and television; other approaches to the analysis of talk in these settings have focused on the interactional frameworks at play in the talk. The aim of this article is to develop the interactional approach by looking at the production of narratives in a mediated context: specifically, the production of a story from two different, and conflicting, points of view. The stories I analyze occur within two different program genres (talk show and television court) where lay members of the public are often called upon to produce accounts of events which are then contested by another participant. This article discusses the significance of tense shifting in these second versions, from narrative past to conversational historic present, in the public construction of believable alternative stories.

Mathematical prescriptivism is a language ideology found in school mathematics that uses a discourse of rationality to proscribe language forms perceived as illogical or inefficient. The present study is based on a three-year ethnographic investigation of Math Corps, a community of practice in Detroit, Michigan, in which prescriptive language in the classroom is used both to highlight beneficial algorithms and to build social solidarity. Although motivated by the analogy with English orthographic reform, prescriptivism at Math Corps avoids potentially harmful criticism of community members of the sort often experienced by African American students. A playful linguistic frame, the prescriptive melodrama, highlights valued prescriptions, thereby enculturating students into the locally preferred register, the ‘Math Corps way’, which encompasses social, moral, linguistic, and mathematical practices and norms. A sociolinguistic and anthropological perspective on prescriptivism within communities of practice highlights positive alternatives to the universalizing prescriptions found in other English contexts. (Prescriptivism, language ideology, mathematics education, community of practice, Math Corps, linguistic anthropology, language socialization)*

This article examines how people complain about technology. Using discourse analysis, we inspect sixteen hours of video-recorded focus-group interviews and focused one-on-one discussions where technology was topicalized. We investigate these conversations paying attention to (i) features of language and its situated delivery, including emphasis, word choice, metaphor, and categorizations; and (ii) how these accomplish social actions. We show how interactants use narratives of complaint-like activities about hypothetical categories of people and confessions of their own complainable participation to accomplish a ‘bemoaning’ speech act that manages competing affiliations, demands, and disagreements to construct reasonable moral identities in the situated interaction. By engaging in specific micro-level discursive practices in interaction, participants produce and reproduce what new technologies ‘mean’ to them and for contemporary society. This shows how important it is to examine opinions as situated actions rather than as simple facts about what people believe. (Complaints, accounts, stance, technology, discourse analysis, identity)*

Linguists and psychologists have noted the potential value of studying speech errors since the 1890s (Meringer & Mayer 1895; Freud 1938; Fromkin 1973; MacKay 1972). The reasoning has been that involuntary errors may lay bare certain aspects of the speech production system which are hidden in normal, errorless speech. Today we are closer than ever before to realizing this hope, because (a) we have more complete samples and analyses of spontaneous errors (Fromkin 1973; MacKay 1970; Garrett 1975) and (b) because of considerable success in recent years in attempts to elicit errors of varying complexity in the laboratory (MacKay 1971; Baars & Motley 1974; Motley & Baars 1976). This paper reports some extensions of the experimental approach, extensions which apparently enable us to elicit almost any arbitrary error at any level of complexity.

This article reports on the application of the concept of social network to the process of language usage among Yoruba-speaking city dwellers in Ile-Ife, Southwestern Nigeria. The study, modeled on L. Milroy (1980), focuses mainly on phonetic/phonological variation within Common Spoken Yoruba (CmSpY). The analysis of the data gathered mainly within face-to-face interviews shows that, whereas we can claim that there is stratification within CmSpY on the basis of sociodemographic factors, the variable of social network manifests a powerful influence on variation in Yoruba language usage and potential change within CmSpY in Ile-Ife. (Linguistic variation, social networks, linguistic focusing)

This article examines the linguistic ideological work entailed in the analyses of Irish by the “revolutionary scholar” and cofounder of the Gaelic League, Eoin MacNeill. It does so to discern one central way in which the essentialized link between the Irish language and a unified Irish people became an efficacious political construction during the armed struggle for independence in the early 20th century. It shows how MacNeill used authoritative linguistic science to engender nationalist sentiment around Irish through semiotic processes even as he challenged a dominant conception of language prevalent in European nationalist movements and social thought. The essay argues that MacNeill wrote against the unilateral valorization of codified linguistic homogeneity and embraced the heterogeneous variation of spoken discourse even as he sought to consolidate Irish national identity through sameness claims. This critical examination suggests that scholars of nationalism reconsider the taken-for-granted homogenizing efforts of nationalist endeavors that are ubiquitously presumed to negatively sanction linguistic variation. (Nationalism, linguistic ideology, Ireland, semiotics, heterogeneity, Eoin MacNeill, Gaelic League, Europe, scientific knowledge)

Claims about signed languages present a unique resource for examining sociopolitical formation and change. Examining three claims drawn from original ethnographic data on Hồ Chí Minh City Sign Language, analysis centers on the ways language practices and language ideologies reflect, respond to, and impact sociopolitical formation in Việt Nam, particularly in connection to state restructuring of deaf education during the political reform period (1986 to present). Signer narratives evaluate such circumstances in relation to notions of citizenship, national development, and social participation to posit signed language as the basis for Deaf people's contributions to national development and broader social change. Articulations between signed language and sociopolitical formation have been largely ignored within mainstream social science disciplines and global disability-oriented development, hindering theoretical and practical projects. This article aims to expand the theoretical scope of language-centered inquiry by demonstrating how ethnographic research on signed languages contributes to examination of sociopolitical formation. (Signed language, Việt Nam, deaf education, sociopolitical, citizenship)*

This study examines the behavior of 331 Spanish speakers, 269 immigrants to the United States and sixty-two native-born individuals, through questionnaires and sociolinguistic interviews. Results show that increased US life experience correlates with expanded use of English in both private and public domains of life. Additionally, greater use of English co-exists with maintenance of fine-grained patterns of structured linguistic variation in Spanish, such that US-born speakers demonstrate remarkable similarity to the immigrant generation in their usage of three variables: (i) subject pronoun presence vs. absence, (ii) grammatical subject position, and (iii) syllable-final /s/. The co-occurence of increased use of English, on one hand, and intergenerational structural continuity in variable linguistic behavior in Spanish, on the other, challenges two misconceptions about Spanish in the United States: that (a) Spanish-speaking immigrants and their US-born children are unwilling or unable to learn English, and (b) regular use of English entails attrition and/or failed acquisition of Spanish. Neither of these views finds empirical support in our data. (Spanish in the United States, comparative variationist linguistics, subject personal pronouns, grammatical subject position, syllable final /s/, bilingualism)

Pronouns and terms of address in interviews, letters, and speeches in Neues Deutschland reflect a variety of address norms. They depend on the participants' social status, geographic origin, party membership, and other factors, and show pronoun avoidance in a number of cases. Sociolinguistic methods applied to written texts can thus reveal possible changes in address norms in the German Democratic Republic. (Sociolinguistics, text linguistics, pronouns of address, language in the German Democratic Republic)

This volume makes available to us a revised and expanded collection of essays originally published in 1992 as a special issue of the journal Pragmatics. In a masterful and greatly expanded introduction to the volume, Kathryn Woolard establishes the parameters of a field that seeks to advance the goal of linking work on language structure with that on language politics, as well as with linguistic and social theory more generally.

This article employs conversation analysis to explore the interpenetration of grammar and preference organization in English conversation in comparison with a previous study for Japanese. Whereas varying the word order of major syntactic elements is a vital grammatical resource in Japanese for accomplishing the potentially universal task of delaying dispreferred responses to a range of first actions, it is found to have limited utility in English. A search for alternative operations and devices that conversationalists deploy for this objective in English points to several grammatical constructions that can be tailored to maximize the delay of dispreferred responses. These include the fronting of relatively mobile, syntactically “non-obligatory” elements of clause structure and the employment of various copular constructions. A close interdependence is observed between the rudimentary grammatical resources available in the two languages and the types of operations that are respectively enlisted for the implementation of the organization of preference.

This analysis focuses on the institutional talk of sea-kayak guides and their clients in order to understand how guides negotiate the interactional balance of giving orders to maintain a safe and timely excursion while facilitating a fun and recreational experience. Using a mixed-method analysis including Conversation Analysis, ethnography, and statistics, this study examines 576 instances of directives found in video recordings of twenty-five Alaskan kayaking ecotourism excursions and explores the practices guides use in their talk to maintain control of an excursion while not coming across as domineering. By systemically examining directives’ design, directives are found to reveal both their temporal urgency in addition to the precipitating events that necessitate them, such as client behaviors or environmental stimuli. This study's analysis contributes to our understanding of how interactants mitigate face-threatening actions and focuses attention on the interactional work that directives and their accounts achieve in an institutional setting currently underinvestigated (Directives, mixed-methods, Conversation Analysis, ethnography, ecotourism)*

The realization of subjectivity through language use is a key concern of sociolinguistic research. We argue for examining it by juxtaposing Goffman's participation framework and Du Bois’ stance triangle. We focus on museums’ commenting platforms as ‘stance-rich’ media (Du Bois 2007:151) by examining the communicative affordances of a visitor book at the Florida Holocaust Museum and analyzing museumgoers’ texts (3,064). These texts are homogeneous in their morally indignant evaluation of the Holocaust and their alignment with the museum, but heterogeneous in positioning and participation framework. Museumgoers’ texts are highly responsive to the setting and previous discourses of the museum and include patterns of shared authorship and principalship. These patterns allow museumgoers to construct shared, institutionally mandated, subjectivities while maintaining personal commitment. These findings contribute to our understanding of the construction of subjectivity as inherently dialogic, and as involving the purposeful use of a multiplicity of contextual resources. (Participation framework, stance triangle, repetitions, principalship, commitment, Holocaust, museums, visitor books)

Membership categories such as ‘doctor’, ‘customer’, and ‘girl’ can form a set of alternative ways of referring to the same person. Moreover, speakers can select from this array of correct alternatives that term best fitted to what is getting done in their talk. In contrast, self-references alone ordinarily do not convey category membership, unless the speaker specifically employs some sort of category-conveying formulation. This report investigates how speakers manage the categorical relevance of these simplest self-references (e.g. ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’) as a practical means of self-presentation. We first describe how speakers forestall recipient attribution of membership categories. We then consider cases where simple self-references are subjected to subsequent elaboration—via self-categorization—in the face of possible recipient misreading of the speaker's category membership. Thereafter, we introduce the practice of contrastive entanglement, and describe how speakers employ it to fashion tacitly categorized self-references that serve the formation of action. (Person reference, conversation analysis, membership categorization devices, race, gender)*

The evidence is practically unequivocal that left-branching (LB) sentences are more difficult to process than right-branching (RB) sentences. In this study, the hypothesis was tested that LB sentences are judged to be more formal than RB ones and that center-branching (CB) sentences would behave like LB ones. Three groups of subjects, university students in England, Wales, and the United States, ordered three versions of 18 sentences in terms of their formality. LB and CB sentences were considered more formal than RB ones by all three groups of students. LB and CB types did not differ from each other. In a second study, American students choose from the group of three sentences the one they would say to a formal listener (professer/employer) or to an informal listener (brother/sister or close friend). RB sentences were attributed to informal listeners and LB and CB sentences, to formal listeners. (Grammar, formality, sociolinguistics)

Recent research has suggested that two linguistic processes are displacing Cockney: the emergence of Multicultural London English (MLE) in inner London and dialect levelling (e.g. Kerswill & Williams 2005). This study investigates firstly whether Cockney phonetic features have ‘moved East’ to Essex (Fox 2015), and secondly the features’ indexicality in relation to place and identity. Fifty-four participants from Debden, an outpost of the Cockney Diaspora, completed a sociolinguistic interview. Vowel measurements were made from a wordlist and passage, and quantitative attitudinal and qualitative data were extracted from a questionnaire and interviews. Overall, changes in identity as a result of social change exceeded linguistic changes, and linguistic labels were not interpreted uniformly across the community. Whilst Cockney variants were largely maintained in young speakers, they were transposed onto an ‘Essex’ accent. Furthermore, some young women but no young men considered themselves Cockney, likely due to the matrifocal nature of Cockney. (Cockney, phonetic variation and change, dialect levelling, identity, indexicality, gender)

This paper, like the research on which it is based, grew out of an interest in the conditions and circumstances which enable children to tell long and involved stories of their own creation. For several years we have been collecting narratives from part-Hawaiian children five to twelve years of age in a variety of circumstances. These include both individual children and self-selected peer groups talking to each other and with one of us around school or in their own neighborhoods (see Watson-Gegeo & Boggs 1977; Watson 1975; Boggs 1972). The description by Sutton-Smith and his collaborators (1975: 82), which parallels some of our experiences, provides a useful introduction to the questions addressed in this paper:

If you keep asking children to make up stories for you and show some delight at the stories they tell; and if you keep coming back and asking for more stories, then the stories get better and better.