Until recently, the members of a community on the Andean-Amazonian agricultural frontier of Southern Peru have tended to limit their social ties to members of their own families. But the residents have begun to forge a ‘community’ through a semiotic distinction between private and public spaces, social practices, and domains of morality. Particular discursive phenomena in the asamblea ‘community meeting’ are deployed to create and maintain the community as a domain of action distinct from kin commitments, and participation in the asamblea offers a context in which to assume a novel political and moral subjectivity. Thus, the social organizational construct of the community is emergent in public interactions. The article concludes with a comparative analysis of public discourse in another comunidad nativa ‘indigenous community’ that has not embraced the notion of ‘community’, and demonstrates how code-switching allows leaders there to invoke both the private and public modes of social authority. (Amazonia, Andes, Matsigenka, Spanish, Quechua)*

Listeners often have the intuition that the speech of broadcast news reporters somehow ‘sounds different’; previous literature supports this observation and has described some distinctive aspects of newscaster register. This article presents two studies further describing the characteristic properties and functions of American English newscaster speech, focusing specifically on prosody. In the first, we investigate the production of newscaster speech. We describe the measurable differences in pitch, speed, intensity, and melodic features between newscaster and conversational speech, and connect those traits to perceptions of authority, credibility, charisma, and related characteristics. In the second, we investigate the perception of newscaster speech. Our experiments demonstrate that listeners can distinguish newscaster from conversational speech given only prosodic information, and that they use a subset of the newscasters’ distinguishing features to do so. (News, prosody, discourse registers, speech perception, credibility, authority)*

This article presents the results of a quantitative analysis of language variation and place attachment in two different places in Denmark—a rural, mono-ethnic village where traditional dialect is still used in everyday practices, and a multiethnic suburban social housing district where speakers use features associated with regional dialect and multiethnic youth styles. It is argued that variationist sociolinguistics, dialect research, as well as sociolinguistics that foregrounds situated interaction analysis need to develop methodologies that include and combine information about speakers’ individual mobility histories, local practices, and future orientations in relation to language use and place. For this purpose, this study employs a quantified measure, an index of local attachment, of speakers’ attachment to their local area. The index is calculated on the basis of insights from ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, and is compared to the variation of three linguistic variables in each location. Results show differences between the two places, the rural and the urban communities, as well as between individuals that can be explained by differences in place affordances, life histories, and future orientation. (Place, local attachment, mobility, dialect, multiethnic speech style, quantitative analysis)*

When a society faces a moment of crisis, its language can mirror, expose, and reinforce societal chaos and fault lines. As India came to terms with COVID-19, the coronavirus’ impacts on different populations exposed and widened India's deep social, economic, and religious divides. This article studies the language of India's response to COVID-19 surrounding three major events that occurred in the early months of the pandemic: the janta curfew, the Tablighi Jamaat incident, and the migrant worker crisis. Through an analysis of media reports, speeches made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and representations on social media, we see how forms of linguistic trickery—silence, presuppositions, accommodations, othering, dog whistling, and povertyism—were used to suppress, harm, and marginalize two minority groups: Muslims and migrant workers. This article demonstrates how those in power use language to reflect, shape, and reinforce meaning, social hierarchies, and marginalization in a time of crisis. (Linguistic trickery, othering, silence, presupposition, accommodation, dog whistling, povertyism)

Work of the Language Survey of Ethiopia is drawn on to illustrate that social surveys can contribute to scientific theories and methods as well as to policy making. Findings with regard to four general problems are indicated: a metric of linguistic distance (considered here in terms of selection of diagnostic traits for linguistic areas, subgrouping of related languages, and dialect variation within a language; measurement of basic cognate frequencies; and testing of mutual intelligibility, a typology of the processes of language spread (lingua franca, mother tongue, superposed variety); verbal deference behavior (in use of Amharic second person pronouns); and pidginization (Simplified Italian of Ethiopia). Some comparisons to findings in sociolinguistics research elsewhere are made. (Language surveys; measurement of linguistic distance; language spread; social meaning and mode of address; pidginization.)

A recent issue of this journal carried an analysis of the theoretical status of variable rules by the present authors (Kay & McDaniel 1979) together with a response by D. Sankoff and W. Labov (1979). The central issue with which Kay and McDaniel dealt was the following: which (if any) of the mathematical assumptions embodied in variable rules may reasonably be attributed to the linguistic abilities of speakers? The Sankoff and Labov response has gone some distance toward clarifying their position in this matter, though problematical issues remain. The basic question divides naturally into two related, though distinct, parts: (1) which (if any) of the mathematical assumptions comprised in the variable rule method are to be taken as substantive claims (versus conveniences for the data analyst)? (2) of the mathematical assumptions which are held to make substantive claims, what is the empirical locus of these claims – that is, what are the claims about (e.g., speakers' linguistic abilities)?

The title of this review article is inspired by Jean Aitchison's (1981) textbook, Language change: Progress or decay?, although I do not intend to discuss her book here. By including historical linguistics, I want to focus attention on the question of whether there has been any progress in the discipline of historical linguistics rather than whether, as Aitchison queries, language change can be thought of in terms of progress or decay (although that question, too, had its heyday [see, for example, Jespersen 18941]). I will start with a simplistic view of “progress” and assume that the notion can be coherently applied to a discipline or research paradigm: assuming that a central goal of historical linguistics is to “explain” language change, if historical linguistics can provide an answer to this question, then the discipline has “progressed.” The two books which I will discuss here, David Lightfoot's Principles of diachronic syntax (1979) and Roger Lass's On explaining language change (1980), bear on this issue although in rather different ways.

This article demonstrates how mediatization facilitates the (re)production of mock language. Through an examination of Chinese netizens’ reactions to a series of viral internet commercials that feature three Hong Kong actors speaking nonstandard Mandarin, it uncovers the processes whereby Gangpu (Hong Kong Mandarin) has become increasingly perceived in China as funny. The vast scale of uptake formulations enabled by mediatization has made it possible for Chinese netizens to engage in a collaborative effort not only in highlighting certain features of Gangpu and certain elements of the commercials but also in presenting them in ways that evoke specific meanings and interpretations. Ultimately, it is through the parodic revoicing of Hong Kong celebrities speaking nonstandard Mandarin that this non-native variety has come to be keyed as humorous. This study shows that we gain a better understanding of how mock practices reinforce and build on each other by tracing their uptake and circulation. (Mediatization, mock language, parody, listening subject, Mandarin Chinese, Hong Kong, China)*

This study argues for the analytical validity of the chronotope in research on context by examining a conversational narrative between Taiwanese and Taiwanese Americans. It offers an endogenous view of context in the sense that chronotopes are anchored by how participants invoke specific time-space representations relevant to the active shaping of context. Furthermore, it adds a historical dimension to the understanding of context as multi-layered in meaning. In the data, participants’ discussion of Taiwanese loanwords creates three connected chronotopes that draw on Taiwan's transnational history for the narrative co-construction. Finally, the chronotopic analysis demonstrates how identities emerge as time-space coordinates—seventeenth-century Dutch in Taiwan and twenty-first-century Taiwanese in the US—and are used as resources to map a shared background with a Taiwanese origin. The study applies the notion of the chronotope outside of the interview setting and contributes to a more laminated theorization of context in naturally occurring conversation. (Chronotope, context, narrative, historicity, Taiwanese American, identity)*

The first goal of this article is to present a description of the linguistic features that distinguish the genderlects of Russian. Although there exist some data on interruptions and other kinds of gender-specific discourse behavior in Russian, they are not discussed here, because the variables that govern gender differences in linguistic behavior are too numerous and inconclusive, and Russian data that bear on such behavior remain at this point too meager. Rather, what is discussed here are the structural features of Russian genderlects. This focus leads to a second goal, a theoretical one: to explore how genderlect phenomena can be explained in the Transactional Discourse Model (TDM), a broadly generative, pragmatically based discourse model that is sensitive to the factors that control the occurrence of gender-specific features in speech.

In two perception experiments we explore the social indexicality of numerical expressions, comparing the evaluation of three variants: precise (e.g. ‘forty-nine minutes’) vs. explicitly approximate (e.g. ‘about fifty minutes’) vs. underspecified (e.g. ‘fifty minutes’). We ask two questions: (i) What constellations of social meanings are associated with each of these variants? (ii) How are such indexical associations modulated by the conversational setting? We find that the choice of approximate vs. precise forms differentially impact speaker evaluation along the social dimensions of Status, Solidarity, and anti-Solidarity, with underspecified numbers showing a flexible behavior. Furthermore, these associations are to some extent affected by the conversational setting, in particular the demands on descriptive precision placed by the context and the interlocutors’ goals. These findings reveal an intimate connection between pragmatic reasoning and social perception, highlighting the importance of integrating pragmatic theory in the study of social indexicality. (Social meaning, pragmatic variation, social perception, numerals, (im)precision)*

The discursive construction of institutional identity concerns how speakers, through their verbal conduct, perform actions as incumbents of particular institutional roles. This can be accomplished through the first-person plural pronoun, a salient marker of the ongoing displays, expressions, and constructions of institutional identity. Drawing on the Chinese premier's press conferences, this study investigates how politicians, journalists, and interpreters constitute their institutional identities through their use of the first-person plural pronoun (English we; Mandarin 我们 wǒmen). Relying on qualitative analysis and bivariate analysis, this study shows that Chinese journalists and interpreters tend to constitute their identities as aligned with the Chinese authority. This stands in contrast to patterns identified in independent press systems, in which journalists confront politicians, and interpreters serve as impartial facilitators. The findings illustrate the bounded fluidity of identities in political discourse and provide insight into the workings of the political communication system in an authoritarian context. (Political discourse, identity, personal pronoun, press conference, journalistic norm, mass communication, interpreter-mediated interaction, China, authoritarianism)*

How is ethnicity indexed linguistically in a speech community in which immigrant L2s have typically not been spoken for three or more generations? Drawing on recordings and ethnographic observations of eighteen white high school girls in south Philadelphia, speakers of Irish descent are shown to differentiate themselves from speakers of Italian descent through their use of (ay0), that is, Canadian Raising. (ay0) is an ongoing sound change in Philadelphia and is remarkable for being a rare example of a male-led change. Irish girls exploit more male-like, backed, and raised variants as a resource for indexing their ethnic identity, which is associated locally with stereotypically masculine characteristics such as toughness. The symbolic reflection of ethnic affiliation through this subtle linguistic device makes use of both local and supralocal social meanings. (Ethnicity, adolescence, Philadelphia, Irish, Canadian Raising, gender, sound change, language, and identity)*

Two hours of conversation among three children were examined for oral disputes concerning use of beds in their bedroom. Examination of transcript segments revealed that the children signaled a social order governing use of property and objects. The children were found to negotiate such use on an ongoing basis, and the form and content of the disputes differed dramatically according to whether the beds were being claimed for the purpose of play or sleep. The conversations reflected the ongoing construction and negotiation of social representations, within shared frames or finite provinces of meaning, for use of space and objects. (Ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, property, ownership)

The creation of a large artificial lake in 1968 that flooded a large part of the Sekani homeland has led to change in the political outlook of the reorganized Sekani villages. In particular, there has been a reemergence of a universalist social–political philosophy, pan-Indianism, that had as its precursor the cultural–political category of phratry. The association between disruption and the emergence of this system of categorization is historically grounded. The particular problem addressed is why the Sekani speak English when there is little direct contact with Euro-Canadians and no particular advantages, in terms of adaptation to the new economic regime, in doing so. Changes in Sekani English in the political sphere and in relationship terms are examined within the context of maintaining a commitment to pan-Indianism/universalism. (Language loss, bilingualism, political culture, ways of speaking, British Columbia, Athapaskan languages)

In applied sociolinguistics in West Germany the notion has been influential that the indigenous working class is separated from the middle class by a linguistic barrier and thus is at a linguistic disadvantage, as well as suffering other forms of disadvantage. The paper places this view in its context within German work on language and society, examines it critically, and outlines why, in the author's view, it is of questionable validity. (Sociolinguistics, dialectology, education, German)