This article analyzes the sociolinguistic construction of two gendered figures in multilingual performances, namely a category of young Mongol wives in rural societies who challenge patriarchal social order, and a group of young urban Mongol men whose dream is to be rich and indulge themselves in luxury. By drawing on the analytical framework of stance and stylization, the study analyzes how the performers’ multivalent stance-taking towards constructed personas and specific social-moral orders are communicated through their skillful stylization of multilingual resources in Inner Mongolia. It also points out that language stylization and stance-taking, taking place in reference to local cultural values and linguistic ideologies, are anchored in continually evolving ethnic, gender, and class relationships in a changing, minoritized Mongolian society in the context of Chinese modernization and capitalist marketization. (Stance-taking, language stylization, gendered discourses, Mongols, multilingualism)*

This article explores how modes of listening and ideologies of democratic action are intertwined, through the example of a multicultural neighborhood in Oslo, Norway. While much work on language and democracy focuses on speakers, this article instead interrogates how a government listens to citizens, and how different conceptualizations of what listening is index different understandings of democratic action. While the Oslo municipality sees listening as a form of legitimation for governmental policymaking, local residents try to create a more open form of listening, which they see to be a better way of addressing the needs of a more diverse citizenry. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with municipal employees, neighborhood organizations, and residents, the analysis focuses on the participation frameworks and interactional genres that my interlocutors take to be instances of democratic listening, and how listening practices are intertwined with imaginations of a more inclusive future. (Listening, democracy, participatory politics, Norway)*

This article examines the language ideologies undergirding university English language admission requirements. Universities are today caught between the order of the nation state and that of corporate globalization as they seek to attract both national and international students. This tension produces conflicting processes of (converse) racialization and linguistic (un)marking within which universities construct language proficiencies and ethnonational identities. Our study finds two categorically different constructs of English language proficiency (ELP): inherent ELP based on citizenship, linguistic heritage, and prior education, and tested ELP. These two constructs of ELP map onto two dichotomous student groups. One side of this binary—the white native-speaker citizen construct—is subject to converse racialization and unmarking. While it becomes blurred, it casts its Other into clear relief: the Asian non-native speaker non-citizen. The research has implications for critical language testing and language policies in higher education. (Citizenship, English as a global academic language, internationalization of higher education, international students, language ideologies, language testing, native speakerism, racialization, World Englishes)

This study explores the emergence and developments through time of a semiotic artefact, the shield, used by demonstrators in violent anti-government protests in contemporary Venezuela. Drawing on the concept of discourse itineraries (Scollon 2008), the material and semiotic transformations this artefact underwent are mapped through various protest cycles, whilst considering the semiotic enrichment of century-long traditions of shields that inform the various functions they play within current day itineraries. The study concludes by discussing the advantages of using the concept of discourse itineraries for understanding moments in the life cycle of semiotic artefacts in the linguistic landscape and outlines future opportunities to expand the analysis of shields beyond the Venezuelan case. (Linguistic landscape of protest, discourse itineraries, semiotic artefact, shields, Venezuela)*

Sociolinguistic approaches to social justice tend to treat the use of interpreters or translators as a remedy to linguistic inequality in multilingual institutional settings. This article challenges this assumption by showing how translation can instead contribute to inequality and discrimination. Drawing on studies of face-to-face interpreting in judicial contexts and of written translation in linguistic landscapes, it explores inequalities found in habitual practices of professional interpreters and in the use of machine translation. It shows how language ideologies about multilingualism motivate translation practices that systematically restrict the participation of speakers of subordinated languages, or that stereotype them as deviant when addressed solely by prohibitions and warnings, a practice I call ‘punitive multilingualism’. The article thus argues that sociolinguistic studies of multilingualism should pay closer attention to translation practices within a wider context of language contact and in relation to phenomena such as translanguaging, mock languages, or language shift. (Translation, interpreting, justice, linguistic landscape, discrimination)*

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)*

This article offers discourse analysis of young transgender people's interaction, in which they describe being rendered powerless through misgendering or misrepresentation. It argues that the young people's collective responses to these moments enable them to challenge the ideologies underpinning their marginalisation, and to recontextualise the language used by others to describe their bodies. Stance-taking, the production of affect, and constructed dialogue are shown to be key tools in their production of an agentive, mutual identity. The article thus provides close analysis of dialogic embodiment, a process by which the body is quite literally spoken into being. By critiquing the cisnormative structures which inform and enable the young people's marginalisation, the article responds to the call for a trans linguistics (Zimman 2020) and reflects upon the author's positionality as a cisgender researcher. (Embodiment, affective stance, agency, trans identity, cisnormativity, trans linguistics)*

Previous research has proposed that phonetic variation may index affect prior to indexing other social meanings. This study explores whether the affective indexicality of vowels identified in previous studies can also be observed among deaf or hard-of-hearing speakers, in this case, speakers of Taiwan Mandarin. The results suggest that /i/ backing is invoked to signal negative affect. This study also demonstrates how assistive devices like hearing aids and cochlear implants can be considered semiotic resources. For deaf or hard-of-hearing speakers, assistive hearing devices enter into a process of bricolage with linguistic and other symbolic resources, generating new potentials for the embodiment of affect. (Affect, iconicity, Taiwan Mandarin, embodied sociolinguistics, deafness)*

In this case study we investigate the role of transnational networks and language brokering in labour migration within the European Union. By describing the working days of Estonians hired by a city maintenance company in Sweden, we demonstrate how language skills and network ties of a manager enable work migration in the local context. Most of the recruited workers belong to the manager's circle of family and friends. The manager is thus both capitalising on his social relationships and reinforcing a social support network in the receiving country for the individuals involved. The article promotes our understanding of the interface between migration, multilingualism, and language brokering in the understudied blue-collar workplaces and dissects the social and economic values of linguistic resources in work migration across the Baltic Sea. The data consist of ethnographic observations of daily work routines, video recordings of interaction, and interviews. (Labour migration, multilingualism, manual work, language broker)*

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)*

With the spread of English in Bahrain, ‘chicken nugget’ emerged as a term aimed at English-dominant, typically private-school-educated youth. Drawing on data from Bahraini youth, I show how participants orient to different timespaces as they negotiate their identities relative to the ‘chicken nugget’ figure of personhood. Applying discourse analytic methods to participants’ metacommentaries, I demonstrate how they utilize scaling to elevate this label to a fractally recursive bundle of discursive processes, deeming a wider range of people as chicken nuggets depending on the chronotopic conditions of different timespaces. I further show how speakers evoke different exogenous and endogenous styles of English to allow for complex identification processes: the English of chicken nuggets is excessive and exaggerated, as opposed to English as a necessary communication tool in neoliberal contexts. Thus, this article has implications for our understandings of fractal recursivity, English use in globalized contexts, and the sociolinguistics of identity. (Scales and scaling, chronotope, center-periphery, English/Englishes, authenticity, bilingualism, Bahrain, Arabic)*

This article explores the shift to non-rhoticity in Oldham (UK), using oral history interviews recorded in the 1980s, with speakers born between 1893 and 1929. We first account for the linguistic constraints on /r/ use and explore macro-level social patterns, where the women were more advanced in the change. We investigate this finding further using a modified version of the lectal focusing in interaction method (Sharma & Rampton 2015), tracking two speakers’ variation through the course of an interaction, and providing insight into the social meaning of rhoticity for these speakers. We suggest that, for them, rhoticity may be ideologically linked to tradition and older ways of life, and non-rhoticity may be ideologically linked to modernity and mobility, and the gender split may partly reflect the men and women's differing orientations to these concepts. We also evaluate the effectiveness of applying modern methods, such as LFI analysis, to archival data. (Rhoticity, social meaning, language variation and change, gender, sociophonetics)*

Neoliberalism has permeated every sphere of social life, including education and language learning, seeking to produce a particular kind of subject, homo economicus, with the dispositions required to manage the self as an economic project. This article unravels the workings of the unfulfilled promise of neoliberal English education and its damaging consequences on a high-achieving female university graduate in the context of contemporary Hong Kong. Combining Marxist and Foucauldian perspectives, while simultaneously drawing on Goffman's concepts of stigma and spoiled identity, our analysis is informed by positioning theory and captures the impact of what we have termed the English language gaze on our informant's sense of self. Seen through a Foucauldian lens, the data reveal the extent, but also the limits, of her assimilation of neoliberal governmentality, while the Marxist lens allows us to account for her plight in terms of alienation and the resulting stigma of a spoiled identity. (Neoliberalism, governmentality, alienation, stigma, spoiled identity, English learning, English language gaze)*

This study merges sociocultural linguistic work on identity construction in interaction with the study of epistemic management in conversation analysis (CA). While some CA scholars have examined identity without relying on epistemics, and others study epistemics without a focus on identity, I hope to contribute to a renewal in the exploration of identity and epistemics in interaction, building on a few recent studies. I examine the discursive processes through which an individual actively and assertively constructs his identities as a New York City resident, a Jewish person, and an actor. I focus on epistemics in the relational identity processes of authentication and denaturalization. I show how a speaker uses authenticating epistemic stances to legitimize his claims to knowledge and related identities, while also denaturalizing others’ rights to knowledge, constructing their identities as inauthentic relative to his own. I argue that epistemics and relational identity processes may be fundamentally intertwined. (Epistemics, identity, conversation, discourse analysis, place, religion, ethnicity, actors)*

The pandemic has exacerbated moral panics about conspiracy theories. Yet defining what conspiracy theories are is just as fraught as figuring out what to do about them. This article provides the first empirical demonstration of how the categories ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘conspiracy theorist’ are used in social interaction. We examined comments from a New Zealand politician about a Covid-19 outbreak at the start of the election period. Using conversation analysis, membership categorisation analysis, and discursive psychology, we tracked how his talk was built and interpreted by participants. The findings show how a conspiracy theory was made recognisable through the machinery of storytelling and how its status as a conspiracy theory was accomplished and challenged through categorisation. We argue that conceptualising conspiracy theories as social actions offers a way to move beyond definitional debates to examine how participants understand and use conspiracy theories in everyday life. (Conspiracy theory, social interaction, categorisation)

Given ongoing debates in Spain over how to reckon with its recent past, time operates as a potent site for doing politics in the Peninsula. In this article, I develop the concept of chronopolitics—that is, the discursive configuration of time or history to advance political projects in the present—by analyzing a speech from the leader of Vox, a radical-right populist party in Spain. Through detailed analysis of the text, I reveal a range of chronopolitical strategies, including blatant acts of historical revisionism and the resurrection of slogans associated with Spain's authoritarian past. I also shed insight on more subtle forms of chronopolitical action: the confusion of temporal modes, the subversion of linear perceptions of time, and metapragmatic talk about historical interpretation itself. My aim is to illuminate Vox's particular tactics of persuasion, while drawing lessons from the case of Spain about the mechanics of populist discourse in general. (Spain, Vox, populism, chronopolitics, time, history)*

Drawing on the epistemologies of the Global South and the sociolinguistic reality of English in postcolonial Bangladesh, this article conceptualises English as a Southern language. This conception recognises the imperative of English for postcolonial societies in an English-dominant world while also emphasising the necessity of breaking away from its hegemony as represented by so-called native speaker or Standard English norms. It is argued that since English works as the principal epistemic tool for knowledge construction and theorising in most disciplines, decolonising knowledge and epistemology in favour of Southern perspectives may not be achieved without decolonising the language in the first place. While English as a Southern language builds on the paradigms of world Englishes, English as a lingua franca, and translanguaging, the proposed conception also seeks a notable departure from them. Calls for the co-existence of epistemologies of the North and South need to recognise English along the same lines. (English as a Southern language, epistemologies of the South, English in Bangladesh, English and representation of the world)*

This study illustrates how speech features that emerged from language contact and acquisition in a pluralistic society can accrue diverse social-indexical meanings over time. The social perceptions towards three variants of coda /l/ in Singapore English—namely dark-l, the variant associated with prescriptive norms, and clear-l and vocalised-l, which are variants that arose through language contact—are examined. The findings show that clear-l and vocalised-l are associated with specific ethnic groups and have equally diverse meanings, but their meanings have evolved differently; vocalised-l is an emerging local standard, whereas clear-l remains largely stigmatised. Their diverse meanings are shown to be connected by social factors within a network of interrelated signs, and their interpretations are dependent on the hearer's experiences, such that we are observing different parts of the sociolinguistic reality. Restricted experiences with the social world and regulation of social perception are also shown to potentially contribute to accent-based prejudices. (Indexicality, language contact, ethnolect, lateral consonant, new Englishes, social perception)*

In this article I focus on the formation and evaluation of chronotopes in social media. More specifically, I analyze the case of a ‘chronotope of the balcony performance’ that emerged in Italy in 2020 during the Covid-19 lockdown. The corpus of the study is constituted by 125 top postings resulting from a Twitter search based on the words Italy, lockdown, and balcony. In line with other scholars (see Goebel 2020), I argue that chronotopes in mass-mediated environments are formed through repetition and recycling of the same or similar semiotic material. I show how in social media expanded participation and the use of trans-semiotic and trans-medial resources ensure wide circulation of images and texts. I also point to the central role of stance taking by users in the constitution of the chronotope as a cultural object, particularly through generalizations and upscaling. (Chronotopes, Covid-19, discourse circulation, stance, scales)*

This article addresses recent calls in sociolinguistics to accommodate the agentive role of material objects in communicative interactions. The study explores how agency is shared between humans and objects, and how the latter may influence and shape the semiotic repertoires in a professional interaction. We adopt interactional sociolinguistics to analyze video recordings from the research group meetings (RGM) of a team of multinational microbiologists in a midwestern American university to demonstrate how the door plays an important role in the RGM genre of discourse. The door serves as a contextualization cue for the opening and composition of the interaction, indexes the participant identities, constructs the interactional space into an ‘ecological huddle’, and frames the ‘professional vision’ by bringing into salience the relevant semiotic resources, footing, participation frameworks, and ethos. (Objects, embodied sociolinguistics, interactional sociolinguistics, ecological huddle, research group meetings)*