Well known for its creation and adoption of modern Hebrew as its national language, Israel is still one of the most linguistically heterogeneous societies in the world. Bernard Spolsky and Elana Shohamy delve into this complex reality and describe a coherent picture of it, drawing from an updated model of linguistic policy which they elaborate. I found no few weaknesses in the book in regard to the sociological interpretation of sociolinguistic facts, but its major interest resides in the description of Israel's linguistic diversity and evolution. It is one of the very few attempts to date to do that, and it merits attention.

Hong Kong has received much world attention in recent years. After a century and half of colonial occupation, it was returned to China in 1997. Before British rule, it was an unremarkable seaside outpost of Guangzhou (Canton), the premier city in South China. Thus, the speech of its overwhelming majority is called “Cantonese” in English. In fact, Hong Kong and Guangzhou share essentially the same speech, the primary differences being lexical choices.

Building on recent work supporting a sociolinguistic approach to orthographic choice, this study engages with paratextual language use in yuri, a subgenre of Japanese shōjo manga ‘girls’ comics’ that centers on same-sex romantic and/or erotic relationships between female characters. The comic magazine Comic Yuri Hime has been the dominant, if not only, yuri-oriented published magazine in Japan since its inception in 2005. Though both written and consumed by a primarily female audience, the magazine has undergone numerous attempts to rebrand and refocus the target audience as a means to broaden the magazine's readership. This change in target demographic is reflected in the stylistic representation of paratextual occurrences of the second-person pronoun anata, indicating the role of the textual landscape in reflecting, and reifying, an imagined target audience. (Script variation, manga, popular media, Japan, yuri manga)

Firmly grounded in local sociopolitical constraints, language policies at Istanbul's Kurdish-run eating establishments often place Kurdish employees’ cultural identity construction at odds with their workplaces’ economic viability. In the face of rigid structures that cement the dominance of Turkish, the Kurdish managers highlighted in a previous study exercise limited agency to enact language policies that align with their pro-Kurdish ideologies, rendering Kurdish largely invisible. This article revisits these themes by examining a nearby Kurdish-run restaurant with a language policy that violates this norm. Applying Darvin & Norton's (2015) model of investment, analyses of observations and interviews consider identity, ideology, and economic capital vis-à-vis employees’ perceived valuation of Kurdish as a workplace language. Results suggest that capital ownership emboldens the audible articulation of Kurdish identities, which emerge from pluricentrically oriented ideologies, fostering resistance to local language policy norms. (Investment, language policy, capital, Kurdish, ideology, pluricentricity)

The article describes the practices through which patients’ self-presentations are challenged in psychotherapy. Based on the analysis of thirty-eight instances from psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, analyzed with methods of conversation analysis, narrative analysis, and coding, this article reports on how therapists challenge patients’ self-conceptualizations in response to patients’ self-presentations. Challenges mostly follow patients’ descriptive, narrative, or evaluative accounts that include a strong claim about their self. Challenges to the self pertain to core issues of the therapeutic projects. They are mostly built in ways that show its sensitivity to probable rejection by the patient. Overwhelmingly, the challenge is accounted for by reference to shared knowledge built in the participants’ shared interactional history. Arguably, psychotherapy is a particular setting where the organization of face-work is modified, as occasional challenging of the co-interactant's self-presentation is part of the institutional task of the professional participant. Data are in Finnish and German. (Self, psychotherapy, Goffman, conversation analysis)*

My theoretical aim in this article is to focus on an examination of processual enactments of scale in light of the technological affordances that are currently at the disposal of a significant majority of humans. I offer the terms algorithmic scales and algorithmic scalar affordances to describe one activist's engagement of practical theories of scale—her ‘algorithmic imagination’ (Bucher 2017)—which led her to design her audience in ways intended to algorithmically scale up, or amplify, her activities on Facebook—to enhance their spread numerically, rapidly, and translocally, making use of the algorithmically constructed communicative possibilities or affordances available to her on the site. (Social media, scale, algorithms, audience design, Facebook, activism, nation, politics)

This article describes the range of discursive strategies in the socializing messages of a mother and daughter interaction. The analysis draws on the work of Bakhtin (1981) and Tannen (2007) to interrogate the role of a physically absent but discursively present sister-in-law, ‘Mami Ji’, across three speech events. Following Tannen, we show how the characterisation of the sister-in-law, Mami Ji, has chronotopic value that connects mother and daughter in the present and makes links across family histories. Through the discursive strategies of repetition, dialogue, detail, and translanguaging, ‘Mami Ji’ becomes an iconic benchmark of how not to speak, how not to dress, and how not to behave. Drawing on material from a linguistic ethnography approach, we present three discourse analyses from a much larger international project that also looked at classroom interaction and break-time conversations. The article contributes to the under-researched topic of the representation of sisters-in-law in discourse, theorises the chronotope in everyday conversation, and demonstrates how mother and daughter solidarity is achieved through opposition to another female family member. (Chronotope, linguistic involvement strategies, translanguaging, socialisation, sister-in-laws, mothers and daughters)

This article investigates the situated orientation to and production of social and political norms related to the pronunciation of person names in the context of announcing next speakers during a political meeting. Through a detailed multimodal analysis of naturally occurring interaction, the article discusses how participants to a political party's congress in Sweden treat the chairpersons’ pronunciation of person names as rendering them (non)normative and as relating them to ethnic categories. In associating specific prosodic realizations of person names with ‘(non)Swedish-ness’ and orienting to this as inacceptable, the participants reflexively establish these membership categories as (non)normative and, moreover, as unequal. In this way, the article contributes to our understanding of normative aspects regarding public announcements of next speakers as a turn-taking procedure in political interaction and how names are invoked and established as related to (non)normative ethnic categories by virtue of the formal properties of their production. (Conversation analysis, ethnomethodology, person names, political interaction, turn-taking, ethnicity, prosody)*

The present article reflects on the concept of ‘spatial repertoire’ through a ‘trans’-perspective in order to explain the trans-formation of migrants’ homescapes during the pandemic—a time of restricted mobility. In the context of translocal im~mobility, this ethnographically informed multiple case study explores how three Greek ‘brain drain’ immigrants performed homescapes in the online-offline nexus from October to February 2020. Employing a critical discourse analytic approach, the findings showcase the pandemic biopolitics that have resulted in the de/reterritorialisation of everyday sociospatial activities, thus creating heterotopic places within the home. Specifically, the integration of work and political activity into the homescape has led to the resemiotisation of the linguistic landscape of homes and the dissolution of boundaries between ‘named’ spaces in homes. The concept of ‘transpatial repertoire’ captures the hybridisation of the pandemic-affected homescape, taking into consideration the vulnerabilities and emergent resistances to biopolitical control. In other words, it sheds light on the emergent heterotopias of im~mobility. (Pandemic, heterotopia, transpatial repertoire, linguistic landscape, homescape)*

An analysis of the salutations of seventy-five letters of application for an academic position at a large southwestern university showed that a majority of the writers (forty-seven as compared to twenty-eight) had become sensitive to the problems of beginning a letter to an unknown person or group with a masculine greeting. The twenty-eight applicants who used masculine greetings used only four different forms. But the forty-seven applicants who chose to use sex-neutral greetings had no well-established pattern to follow. Hence, they used nineteen different forms, which shows that the matter is currently in a state of experimentation. From an analysis of the candidates' supporting data, it was clear that the writers who used the sex-neutral greetings were the better qualified candidates. Females were more inclined than males to use sex-neutral greetings. And there was a correlation between the part of the country where a candidate lived and whether or not a sex-neutral greeting was chosen. (Sexism, diachronic linguistics, regional dialectology)