An important addition to the growing literature on language ideology, this volume is the fruit of an advanced seminar held in Santa Fe in 1994 at the School of American Research. The seminar brought together some of the leading scholars in language ideology research: Richard Bauman, Charles Briggs, Joseph Errington, Susan Gal, Jane Hill, Judith Irvine, Paul Kroskrity, Susan Philips, Bambi Schieffelin, and Michael Silverstein. Regimes of language consists of revised versions of the papers presented at the seminar.

Analysis of a sociolinguistic interview reveals repeated presentation of ideas, words, expressions, and structures. These recurrent devices and patterns increase the effect of arguments. The immediate purpose is the listener's acceptance of the speaker's views. There is also a concern to gain recognition of the speaker's opinion of self and his position in society. (Poetics in conversation, argumentation, repetition, Montreal French, Quebec)

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 article analyzes the language ideology (Silverstein 1979; Woolard & Schieffelin 1994) circulated in Section 8 of the United States Federal Rules of Evidence (FRE), focusing on the consequences to discursive agency when this language ideology is used to appropriate an utterance for use as evidence. Section 8 of the FRE, or the hearsay rule, bars the testimonial, in-court repetition of second-hand statements. The excited utterance exception to hearsay admits an utterance as long as it was made by an excited speaker, while s/he was under the sway of an exciting event, which the excited utterance must also report. This rule explicitly trusts spontaneous speech, entextualizing it as a trustworthy account of an event, using the reasoning that such an utterance is not made by a speaker capable of self-reflection. I show that this language ideology problematically links discursive agency (Butler 1997; Medina 2006) with an untruthful speaker-role. Using the concept of fractal recursivity (Irvine & Gal 2000), I argue that the presuppositions embedded and circulated metadiscursively in this rule of evidence effectively constitute a speaker without legally “recognizable” discursive agency. This effect is the most noticeable and the most consequential when the excited utterance exception is used to appropriate the speech of women who have been the victims of domestic violence. Ultimately I argue that discursive agency is a feature of language ideology. (Discursive agency, legal discourse, language ideology, evidence, metadiscourse, domestic violence)*

This article investigates the transformation of minority language practice in the light of changing European language ideologies. Following a group of young Carinthian Slovenes from their rural hometowns to the capital of Vienna, this article analyzes their metadiscursive commentary about place and language in order to show how local language ideologies structure the indexical orders under which these individuals learn to assign meaning to linguistic practice. The data I present illustrates that these young members of a rurally stigmatized linguistic minority experience a transformation of their language-associated personhood in Vienna. There, their bilingualism allows them to be cosmopolitan participants in a European vision of mobile multilingual citizenship, while simultaneously troubling the language hierarchies erased by European language ideologies. (Linguistic minority, language ideology, indexical order, chronotopes, multilingualism, Carinthian Slovenes, Austria, Europe)

As indicated by the title, this book steers away from traditional, atheoretical, praxis-oriented frameworks for studying interpreting. Its strength lies in its call for research that describes interpreted events as a means of moving away from prescriptive approaches to the discipline. The book discusses Roy's own application of discourse theory in her analysis of a videotaped interpreted event. The languages represented in that event are American Sign Language (ASL) and English, but the conclusions and recommendations made by the author are equally relevant to both signed and spoken language researchers, interpreters, interpreter trainers, and interpreters in training. Drawing on research in interactional sociolinguistics, Conversation Analysis, and ethnography of communication, Roy provides a rich description and analysis of a 30-minute meeting between a deaf student and a professor at a U.S. university. Through her analysis, Roy challenges the belief that interpreters serve as a conduit providing direct interaction between primary interlocutors.

Anthropologists often construe “property” in terms of rights, obligations, and interests, or use “property” in a largely undefined way. The use of the language of rights as a metalanguage is questionable for it is culturally specific, having developed in the Early Modern period in Europe in the context of the spread of market relations and the growth of contract law. One might ask, how are “rights” expressed and constituted in the indigenous languages? The article examines the role of language in the constitution of possession relations with reference to three case studies: ownership of land by Kaiadilt people of Bentinck Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, possession more generally among Navajo of the southwest United States, and family/household “property” of the Southern Song dynasty of China. It focuses on the constitution of possessors, possessions and connections between them, and the expression of norms entailed by relations between possessor and possessum. (Property, possession, rights, Kayardild language, Navajo language, Southern Song dynasty, metalanguage)*

Among the Weyéwa of the eastern Indonesian island of Sumba, place names are not merely labels or verbal tools for referring to locations, but rather resources for the construction of discourse. As such, they figure in Weyéwa ritual speech events in two fundamental ways. First, an individual place name can be the topic of etymological speculation, in which the verbal account of the history of a name is an exercise in the establishment of authority. Second, place names frequently occur in lists, as syntagmatic chains which serve to guide the form of ritual speech events. This use of toponyms not only characterizes Weyéwa epic narratives, but rites of misfortune, prayers, and songs. These genres utilize a “path” or “journey” metaphor in which points of the itinerary are spatially anchored by means of place names. (Ritual speech, narrative, authority, place names)

Examples of falsetto and higher pitched modal voice are presented in which the meanings are linked iconically and/or indexically to the signs, and therefore nonarbitrarily. Nine such meaning types are identified and discussed as inferences about falsetto derivable from observations that are minimally informed by cultural traditions. Observational knowledge and the logic by which it is utilized are seen as central concepts mediating universals and relativist approaches to the social meanings of voice qualities, including falsetto, and it is proposed that most falsetto use can be placed within the nine functional meaning categories identified. (Voice quality, falsetto, iconicity, indexicality, observational logic, universals, relativity)*

This article examines how the official legal record, presumably an institutional space consisting of Standard American English (SAE), can become a record of a regional variety of English. Utilizing theory from language contact situations, interactional sociolinguistics, and critical discourse analysis, it describes and explains how a prestigious societal institution, often analyzed as imposing its powerful voice on those less powerful, exhibits some permeability as it absorbs at least a few discursive representations of a less dominant bilingual and bicultural group. Traces of the Spanish-English contact situation, biculturalism, and Latino life find their way into the official discursive space via stereotype, topic, lexical items, prepositions, and some verbal constructions. The discussion covers why some legal arenas are more impervious to linguistic and cultural diversity (or “accented English”) than are others. The conclusion discusses what such representations might mean for Latina women.The National Science Foundation's Law and Social Science Program (SBR#-9709938) and the Social Science Research Council's Sexuality Research Fellowship Program provided funding for data collection for this study. I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and Barbara Johnstone for their comments and critiques on earlier versions of this article. While any remaining errors or oversights are mine alone, the reviewers' and editor's linguistic knowledge and insight have helped to make the work stronger and clearer. Also, I am grateful to Florida State University's Winthrop-King Foundation for paying Ms. Shelley Bayless to help me codify and count data. And finally, I must thank my mother, Angela M. Trinch, for being there when both of my children were born so that I could work on this article.

Meant to be challenging, controversial, and even radical, McWhorter's (McW) latest work on creole genesis may well be the most revisionist book on contact languages to appear since Bickerton's Roots of Language (1981) and Thomason and Kaufman's Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics (1988). It will therefore be required reading for anyone interested in the ongoing exploration of the origins of plantation creoles and of contact languages in general.

Sign language lexicons include iconic items, where phonological form is somewhat representative of sense. As experiences of individuals change, the mapping from form to meaning may become inappropriate (as when technological or environmental changes occur) or may be considered incongruous with perceptions of reality (as when culture shifts). Many misalignments of form and sense are tolerated, with the result that a sign's original iconicity is lost. Other misalignments are obliterated; signers make sublexical changes or entire lexical substitutions. We call these (sub)lexical changes ‘corrections’. We argue that misalignments that are regrettable are more likely to be corrected, where regrettable misalignments are those that are not true to realities/experiences of profound importance to deaf individuals.

While the focus here is on American Sign Language, corrections should be apparent in any sign language and might occur in those spoken languages with a high frequency of nonarbitrary relationships between form and sense. (Sign language, variation, taboo terms, euphemism, iconicity, identity)*

Children's first school books contain a considerable amount of reported talk among characters in the stories. This is a central aspect of the characterization of these books as transitional from the conventions of oral language to the conventions of written prose, that is, as introductions to literacy. The nature of the written representation of conversation in such books has not previously been examined. This paper presents a partial analysis of this feature of beginning school readers, focussing on “question-answer sequences.” We show how these representations of talk compare with naturalistic research on child-adult interaction at home and in classrooms, and we propose that the model of child-adult talk portrayed in “home” and “school” scenes in the books appears to endorse some of the conventions for participation in instructional talk, and in this respect is implicitly a source of socialization into classroom culture. At the same time, we find that the texts give child speakers far more initiative in conversation than typically obtains in classroom talk, and this is seen also to be a feature of the social constitution of the child in these texts. Thus an image of childhood which combines conversational initiative and conversational competence as a member of the classroom community is conveyed. The paper also points out possible difficulties for child readers in interpreting the talk-on-paper, arising both from textual formats and from the particular version of the child as conversationalist which the books describe (Child-adult conversation, question-answer sequences, first school books, literacy acquisition).

Researchers have called for studies that link the macro and the micro in language policy research. In turn, the notion of ‘micro’ has been theorised as referring either to the micro implementation of macro policies or to micro policies. In this article, a third way of thinking about the relationship between the macro and the micro in language policy—referred to as the interpretive perspective—is proposed. In this perspective, macro language policies and micro language choice practices are seen as interdependent, as shaping each other. The article substantiates this view drawing on a practice I call translinguistic apposition and that I have observed in a variety of ‘most highly regulated’ texts in Rwanda. However, for an in- depth understanding, the practice is described drawing on data from a single source, namely the Rwandan multilingual media blog www.igihe.com. The article demonstrates how this practice can be seen as shaped by the Rwandan macro language policy and, conversely, how the same macro policy can be seen as written into being through the same micro level practice. (Language policy, micro language policy, micro implementation of macro policy, translanguaging, translinguistic apposition, interpretive perspective)

This study contributes to the body of cross-linguistic research on repetition, repair, and action-formation more generally. Using conversation-analytic and interactional-linguistic methods to analyse both position and composition in the formation of actions accomplished by other-repetitions in French, the study underscores the interplay between linguistic design, sequential organisation, and territories of knowledge and accountability in interaction. The actions conveyed by other-repetitions, and the responses made relevant, are affected by both (i) the design of the repetition turn itself—involving various features of prosody (e.g. intonation contour type and pitch span), grammar, and lexis—and (ii) the sequential location of the repetition, including the particulars of the talk that gets repeated and the relevancies set up by that previous talk. The study concludes with a discussion of its significance for research on action-formation as well as for research on the pragmatics of intonation. (Repair-initiation, surprise, acceptability, registering, intonation, epistemics, agency)*

It is received wisdom in variationist sociolinguistics that linguistic and social factors go hand in hand in structuring variability in language and any consequent instances of language change. We address the complexity of such factors by exploring data from several Arabic dialects in the eastern Arab world. We demonstrate that language change does not always follow expected phonological trajectories, even in cases where older changes are reconstructed to have operated along so-called universal patterns. In our explanation of recent changes in these dialects, we emphasise the role of social motivations for language change and the interactions between these social constraints and purely linguistic ones. Our analysis of change is supported by historical accounts of variation and change in Arabic. We illustrate how general principles of sociolinguistic theory apply to the Arabic data and provide additional layers of sociolinguistic information that highlight the importance of diverse data for evaluating cross-linguistic generalisations. (Arabic, language change, historical sociolinguistics)

An American-influenced singing accent, referred to here as Pop Song English (PSE), is common in popular music throughout (and beyond) the Anglophone world. This article presents an analysis of the sung pronunciation of two variables (bath and nonprevocalic /r/) that distinguish New Zealand English (NZE) from American Englishes (AmE). The Phonetics of Popular Song (PoPS) corpus includes 154 performers, structured according to country of origin (NZ and the US) and musical genre (pop and hip hop). An auditory analysis was conducted for each variable, distinguishing between the NZE and PSE/AmE variants. Almost all New Zealand performers adopt the PSE variants at least some of the time, with greater adherence to the American model in pop than in hip hop. In the US, region determines hip hop, but not pop, artists’ degree of rhoticity. PSE represents a supralocal norm for pop music, while hip hop artists tend to use their ‘own accent’. (Pop Song English, singing accent, rap accent, supralocal norm, nonprevocalic /r/, trap–bath split, intentionality, language performance, pop music, hip hop, responsive style, initiative style)*

In Luang Prabang, Laos, pétanque players distinguish two types of gambling: ‘gambling for beer’ and ‘gambling for money’. They readily and vividly contrast these types in abstraction but are more circumspect about identifying actual games as instances of one kind or another. In this article, I trace how players use these types in two modes of typification—as generics and specifics—and articulate a new way to approach similar salient and ideologically weighty ‘ethno-metapragmatic terms’, which can appear messy and unwieldy. I argue that pulling apart these modes of typification clarifies how and why people use such terms for social action, and where anyone studying them—or the types that are thought to underly them—should begin. (Generic reference, specific reference, typification, social types, explicit/implicit, metapragmatics, linguistic anthropology, Laos)*