This article unlocks the complex indexicalities pertaining to names in a multilayered diasporic field, one in which descendants from different ancestral areas of a former homeland (India) have merged loosely into a new community (in South Africa). The focus falls on large-scale innovations in officially registered personal names over a period of 150 years. A mixture of qualitative and quantitative analysis of over 2,300 names shows the influence of social variables like religion, class, and subethnic affiliations via different ancestral languages. These result in different choices in retaining traditional names, modernising them, or adopting Western ones. There is also evidence of asymmetric accommodations as names flow from one subgroup to another, but not vice versa. A novel pattern in Indo-Dravidian studies is presented, that harnesses rhyme (or consonant mutation) and ablaut (or vowel mutation) to generate new names, carrying the indexicalities ‘Indian South African’, but also ‘modern’ and ‘globally oriented’. (Socio-onomastics, name changes, Indian South Africans, Indian languages, Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, asymmetric accommodations)*

This statement is an opening point for the discussion on the effects of the dominance of English as a language of science on other languages and speech communities. The global search for a common auxiliary language that allows unprecedented possibilities for international cooperation, and the resulting prevalence and dominance of English in science, vary in kind and degree, as well as in effects, across language communities and countries. The volume under review is an outstanding one with respect to both thematic diversity and depth of analysis in most of its essays. Since Fishman et al. 1977 edited the first collection of essays on the spread of English, numerous valuable books on the status of English as a global language have been published (Flaitz 1988, Doyle 1989, Kachru 1992, Pennycook 1994, Hartmann 1996, Fishman et al. 1996, Crystal 1997, Ryan & Zuber-Skerritt 1999), but there is no doubt that Ulrich Ammon has edited an extremely innovative and insightful volume.

This article takes an empirical approach to investigate how diasporic identification with the home-land and host-land interacts with language in a mutually influencing dynamic interplay, giving rise to new language ideologies and identities. Since scholars are increasingly of the opinion that the processes of dislocation and resettlement create multi-layered connections with the home-land and host-land (David 2012:377), it is crucial we recognise that the relationship between fixed geographical territories and communities, and the cultural-linguistic practices associated with them, need to be denaturalised (Rosa & Trivedi 2017:331). In doing so, it is possible to retheorise diasporic identity as a sociocultural process. Attention to language can help shift diasporic phenomena away from being defined as ‘bounded, territorialised, static and homogeneous’ (Canagarajah & Silberstein 2012:82). Examining Sri Lankan Tamil diasporic experiences of the home-land and host-land and their relationship with language will promote such an agenda. (Diaspora, space, home-land, host-land)*

This, the fourth American anthology about language and sexual minorities, is more consistently professional, more focused on written texts, less focused on explicating rhetorical effects, and considerably more focused on gender than its predecessors (Chesebro 1981, Ringer 1994, and Leap 1995). Why “sexuality” is included in the subtitle at all is a mystery. In contrast to Leap's pioneering collection, sexual practices are almost entirely invisible (inaudible?) herein. The editors claim to have “collected a series of articles that approach the study of language from the twin perspectives of gender and sexuality, conceived as separate but intricately linked categories” (p. 5); but it seems that, in utero, gender throttled sexuality (while sex, either in the sense of biological differences or in the sense of tactile contact, was never conceived).

China's program of language modernization has been as successful as that of any other nation, yet until Chen's book, we have not had a readable and comprehensive discussion of its reforms. Literacy has risen from about 10% in 1949 to around 80% today. Spoken Chinese dialects, from Cantonese through Hakka to Mandarin, vary as much as do the Germanic languages English, German, and Swedish; so it is a major achievement that 90% of Chinese people can now understand Standard Mandarin, up from 40% in the 1950s (p. 8). The current reforms have roots deep in the 19th century, but Chen discusses how early visions of reform became successful only in the past few decades. An unusual virtue of this compact volume is that it discusses language reforms throughout Greater China – not only in the People's Republic, including Hong Kong, but in Taiwan and Singapore as well.

This is the first textbook on metaphor to appear after the cognitive linguistic revolution of metaphorical research launched two decades ago by Lakoff & Johnson with their pioneering work, Metaphors we live by. Much scholarship has since been devoted to this paradigm of research. Twenty years have passed, and Kövecses takes this as a good time to summarize the development of the field. Writing a textbook on metaphor certainly reflects the maturation of the study of metaphor within the cognitive linguistic tradition. Targeted readers are undergraduate and graduate students with interests in metaphor and cognitive linguistics. Experienced researchers may also find this book helpful in motivating new ideas.

This article explores the semiotic spaces occupied by organizations working against discrimination in Sweden. Expressions of identity, norm critique, and political goals are studied in relation to word production and language policy and planning. The study departs from interviews with representatives from three organizations within the hbtqi, antiracist, and disability movements. Other resources connected to them have also been analyzed, such as glossaries. Theoretically, this study draws on Yuri Lotman's concept of semiospheres, allowing the analysis to weigh in the whole semiotic process, including meaning production, policy work, and concrete word production. This approach completes an analysis of indexical orders. The results show that (a) organizations are aware of the importance of linguistic choices, (b) when new concepts and words are spread to the public, tension can arise and sometimes objections, and (c) word meanings change when used in public discourse. (Language policy and planning, semiosphere, indexical order, hbtqi, antiracism, disability, discrimination)

This article questions the time of white modernity based on historical periodization and sequential progression, arguing for a more multifaceted approach to time and space in linguistic landscapes (LL). It rethinks the concept of chronotope by examining effects of the African diaspora in Brazil. The experience of radical uprooting it promoted fuses spatiotemporal dimensions that operate in complementary directions. On the one hand, a necrotope sets forth submission and destruction. On the other, visceral resistance to obliteration emerges when the timespace of encruzilhadas ‘crossroads’ is produced in the cracks of colonial power. The LL at Pedra do Sal in Rio de Janeiro suggests that approaching timespace from this perspective captures the juxtaposition of stasis and mobility, oppression and resistance, loss and life, past and present. We argue that thinking of time outside and against the Euro-chronometer requires decolonial epistemologies that have the potential to disrupt racist chronologies. (Chronotope, linguistic landscapes, African diaspora, temporality, race, Rio de Janeiro)*