It has been claimed that gossip allows participants to negotiate aspects of group membership, and the inclusion and exclusion of others, by working out shared values. This article examines instances of gossipy storytelling among young friends during which participants negotiate self- and other-identities in particular ways. Participants are found to share judgments not only about others' behavior but also about their own behavior through particular processes of othering. A range of discursive strategies place the characters in gossip-stories (even in the category called “self-gossip”) in marginalized, liminal, or uncertain social spaces. In the gossipy talk episodes examined, social “transgression” might be oriented to as a serious matter and thus pejorated, or oriented to in a playful key and thus celebrated. This ambiguity – “Do we disapprove or approve, of this ‘bad’ behavior?” – means that in negotiating the identity status of “gossipees” liminality is constant. It is argued that othering, as an emergent category, along with the particular discursive strategies that achieve it, is an aspect of gossip that deserves further attention.We thank Jane Hill, two anonymous reviewers, and especially Nik Coupland for their most helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. To clarify the title, from ex.(1), you can pull is British English; in American English perhaps the closest expression to pull is get with, proactively set up a link with someone, probably a sexual one, probably only for one evening or night.

Departing from interactionally focused research on the “representations” (cf. “constructions”) of the “other,” including recent dynamic approaches to the sociolinguistics of style/styling, this article looks into the practice of talk about men that resonated in the conversations of four Greek adolescent female “best friends.” The discussion sheds light on the interactional resources that participants draw upon to refer to and identify or categorize men, their local meanings, and their consequentiality for gender identity constructions (in this case, both masculinities and femininities). It is shown that personae and social positions of men are drawn in the data by means of a set of resources (nicknames, character assessments, stylizations, membership categorization devices) that occur in, shape, and are shaped by story lines (intertextual and coconstructed stories that locate men in social place and time). It is also shown that the men talked about are predominantly marked for their gendered identities: Social styles that represent men as “soft” (“babyish,” “feminine”) or “tough” (“hard”) are those that are more routinely invoked. Each mobilizes specific resources (e.g. stylizations of the local dialect for “hard” men), but both are drawn playfully. The conclusion considers the implications of such discursive representations for the gender ideologies at work and the participants' own identity constructions and subjectivities.Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Birkbeck College Applied Linguistics seminars and at the 8th International Pragmatics Association Conference, Toronto, 2003. I am grateful to audiences there for their comments, to Nikolas Coupland for fiercely constructive criticism, to an anonymous reviewer for encouragement, and last but not least, to the sharp editorial eye of Jane Hill.

In many bilingual and multilingual communities, certain communicative practices are code-specific in that they conventionally require, and are constituted in part through, the speaker's use of a particular code. Code-specific communicative practices, in turn, simultaneously constitute and partake of code-specific genres: normative, relatively stable, often metapragmatically salient types of utterance, or modes of discourse, that conventionally call for use of a particular code. This article suggests that the notions of code specificity and code-specific genre can be useful ones for theorizing the relationship between code and communicative practice in bilingual/multilingual settings, particularly those in which language shift and other contact-induced processes of linguistic and cultural change tend to highlight that relationship. This is demonstrated through an examination of how young children in St. Lucia are socialized to “curse” and otherwise assert themselves by means of a creole language that under most circumstances they are discouraged from using.The fieldwork on which this article is based was supported by the Fulbright Program, the National Science Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; immediate post-fieldwork support was provided by the Spencer Foundation. The work time necessary for writing this article was made possible by a Temple University Presidential Research Incentive Summer Fellowship, a Temple University Research/Study Leave, and a Wenner-Gren Foundation Richard Carley Hunt Fellowship. For their comments on a much briefer earlier version (presented at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association), I thank Bambi Schieffelin, Patricia Baquedano-López, and Leslie Moore. For comments on this version, I am grateful to Jane Hill and two anonymous reviewers. I am solely responsible for any and all shortcomings.

This article investigates the role of script choice in bilingual writing, drawing on classified advertisements and other texts written for and by Russian-speaking immigrants in New York City. The study focuses on English-origin items that appear in Russian texts, which are found to be written either in roman or Cyrillic script. Through an investigation of categorical and variable constraints on this variation, it is found that script choice relates to the distinction between lexical borrowing and single-item codeswitching. It is argued that writers may, consciously and on a token-by-token basis, choose the Cyrillic script to mark a word as borrowed or the roman script to mark it as foreign. However, they may also avoid this choice, as hybrid forms attest, especially when the use of characters shared by both alphabets allows ambiguous readings. The findings thus have implications for understanding notions of language boundaries in bilingual language use.Versions of this article were presented at two conferences: “Alphabetics: Interpreting letters” at Harvard University, 26–27 April 2003, and NWAVE 32, Philadelphia, 9–12 October 2003. I thank the audiences for their valuable insights and observations, especially Erika Boeckeler and Daniel Kokin. I also owe thanks to Katya Korsunskaya, Vladislav Rapoport, Doris Stolberg, Mario Geiger, and Tobias Kuhn. I am grateful to John Victor Singler, Mark Sebba, and Jannis K. Androutsopoulos, as well as to Jane H. Hill and to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. All errors and omissions remain my own.

Detailed analysis of transcripts is a time-honored practice among linguistic ethnographers. In contemporary research, however, interactions among global forces distant from ethnographic sites are critical for analysis and explanation, as is the fact that multiple sites must be covered. Ethnographers' interests, pragmatic relevance, and personal deixis militate against the ability of site-specific talk to serve as raw material for construction of the representations of those distant global forces. In this article, local discourse, as manifested in ethnographic oral-history interviews, is viewed first as a test of the impact of those global forces. Second, the talk is a construction that can be explained in terms of those forces' linkage with global representations. Finally, the concept “fractal” is suggested as a possible way to show such links.NOTE: Support by NIH/NIDA grant no. DA-10736 is gratefully acknowledged.

This article is an exploration of how a group of men in the United States create homosocial (as opposed to homosexual) desire through language. In a society in which dominant discourses of masculinity provide competing scripts of male solidarity and heterosexuality, the achievement of closeness among men is not straightforward but must be negotiated through “indirect” means. It is shown how men actively negotiate dominant cultural discourses in their everyday interactions. In addition, a broadened view of indirectness, based on social function as much as denotation, is argued for.This article was initially presented in much shorter and different form at the Second International Gender and Language Association (IGALA) Conference in Lancaster, U.K., in April 2002. I would like to thank the audience there, and in particular Jennifer Coates, for their comments and lively discussion. I would also like to thank Deborah Tannen for her insightful comments and advice, and two anonymous reviewers whose comments strengthened the article considerably. I would also like to thank the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago for inviting me to have conversation about this work in their semiotics workshop, and specifically Lauren Keeler, Jonathan Rosa, and Michael Silverstein. Ultimately, responsibility for the article's contents remains with the author.

Unlike class or ethnicity, gender-based differences are assumed to result from social difference, not distance, yet across multiple societies, researchers find that gender separation is practiced to varying degrees. Such separation creates distance. Preference for same-gender affiliations emerges around age three, peaks in middle childhood, and lessens during the teen years, yet persists in the workplace and later life. Though reasons for this are many, Thorne (1993:51) identified one finding in these terms: “Where age separation is present, gender separation is more likely to occur.” Because age segregation varies with stage of life, one may predict that gender segregation would wax and wane across the lifespan. This study investigates this prediction with three sociolinguistic variables of Puerto Rican Spanish. In turn, it explores the prediction across other varieties of Spanish, German, and English, focusing on variables that are stable, undergoing change, or in the end stage of loss.I want to send very special muchísimas gracias to Miriam Meyerhoff and William Labov for critical, insightful, and engaged readings of an earlier version of this research. Over the past two years, I have presented portions of this research at various conferences. In these contexts, on more than one occasion, Greg Guy, Gillian Sankoff, and Shahrzad Mahootian have provided both critical and supportive comments. I admire and love all these people. Finally, I thank Jane Hill and the two reviewers whose very useful comments called for clarification and qualification. I appreciate their attention very much. None of these individuals is responsible for shortcomings in the research. I hope any shortcomings here will stimulate long-term research elsewhere. Besos a Diana González-Cameron, mi esposa.

This article underscores the importance of examining interlocutors' history in studies of intercultural communication. Five historical factors and four contextual factors are proposed and illustrated with interview and videotaped data, showing how each factor predetermines the interactants' power dynamics, thus shaping and influencing the process and outcome of interaction. Analyzing videotaped interactions between Japanese technical supporters and American workers on the production floor also demonstrates the interlocutors' creative utilization of available communicative resources and co-construction of meaning as interactions unfold. This co-construction of meaning occurs despite the severely limited knowledge of the other group's language and sociolinguistic norms.I thank all the study participants at Japan Die Company, who spent their precious time for my research. I am indebted to Miyako Inoue, Elizabeth Keating, Keith Walters, and Tony Woodbury for providing me with useful comments, insights, and encouragement, and Ellen Nakamura for proofreading the text. Thanks also to the School of Asian Studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, for supporting my writing of this article. Earlier versions of this project were presented at Stanford University, Nagoya University, and Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, and I appreciate the audiences' valuable feedback.

Following the return of sovereignty from Britain to China, Hong Kong has undergone significant sociopolitical and educational changes. This study is a quantitative investigation of the language attitudes of 1,048 secondary students from the first postcolonial generation brought up amid the significant changes after the political handover. The results show that the respondents feel the most integratively inclined to Cantonese (the vernacular variety), and they perceive English (the colonizers' language) as the language of the highest instrumental value and social status, while Putonghua (the language of the new ruler) is rated the lowest from both the integrative and the instrumental perspectives. Unlike what has been predicted by scholars, Putonghua has not yet taken the place of English as the language of power. Despite this, there are signs of a subtle transition toward an accommodating attitude to Putonghua, mainly induced by the growing instrumental value of the language for economic purposes.

“Creole Exceptionalism” is defined as a set of beliefs, widespread among both linguists and nonlinguists, that Creole languages form an exceptional class on phylogenetic and/or typological grounds. It also has nonlinguistic (e.g., sociological) implications, such as the claim that Creole languages are a “handicap” for their speakers, which has undermined the role that Creoles should play in the education and socioeconomic development of monolingual Creolophones. Focusing on Caribbean Creoles, and on Haitian Creole in particular, it is argued that Creole Exceptionalism, as a sociohistorically rooted “régime of truth” (in Foucault's sense), obstructs scientific and social progress in and about Creole communities. Various types of Creole Exceptionalist beliefs are deconstructed and historicized, and their empirical, theoretical, and sociological flaws surveyed. These flaws have antecedents in early creolists' theories of Creole genesis, often explicitly couched in Eurocentric and (pre-/quasi-)Darwinian doctrines of human evolution. Despite its historical basis in colonialism and slavery and its scientific and sociological flaws, Creole Exceptionalism is still enshrined in the modern linguistics establishment and its classic literature, a not unexpected state given the social structure of scientific communities and the interaction between ideology and “paradigm-making.” The present Foucauldian approach to Creole Exceptionalism is an instantiation of a well-defined area of the linguistics/ideology interface. The conclusion proposes alternatives more consistent with Creole structures and their development, and more likely to help linguists address some practical problems faced by Creole speakers.This project has been supported by, inter alia, a much-appreciated fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (# FA-37500-02). While I am responsible for the views and errors in this paper, I feel immensely privileged to have benefited from the generous encouragement and judicious comments of editor Jane Hill and two anonymous reviewers at Language in Society, and of many friends and colleagues: Myriam Augustin, Marie-Lucie Brutus, Noam Chomsky, Yves Dejean (Papa Iv), Dominique Fattier, Marilyn Goodrich, Ken Hale, Dimitri Hilton, Tometro Hopkins, Tami Kaplan, Antonia MacDonald-Smythe, Heliana Mello, Miriam Meyerhoff, Salikoko Mufwene, Marilene Phipps, Ella Maria Ray, Faith Smith, Geneva Smitherman, Arthur Spears, and Adrienne Talamas.

Psycholinguistic attempts to model metaphor processing can be broadly classified as correspondence or class-inclusion in orientation. This article develops a framework for approaching metaphorical discourse by reconstructing these processing models as discourse types that are associated with particular activity types. In doing so, it treats these discourse types as particular strategies of recontextualization, where, depending on the discourse type being used, the metaphor source – and consequently, the status of the discourse itself as metaphorical – is either foregrounded or not. The second part of the article applies the framework to texts embedded in two different activity types: popular science texts which aim to explain technical concepts, and management texts which aim to provide management tips. The former, it is shown, uses the correspondence discourse type, while the latter uses the class-inclusion type.I would like to thank Desmond Allison, Jane Hill, Benny Lee, K. P. Mohanan, Rajendra Singh, Christopher Stroud, and two anonymous referees for valuable comments and suggestions. Special thanks to Lim Cherng Wren for inspiring this article. Needless to say, I alone am responsible for any errors that remain.

This study focuses on the everyday use of spatial frames of reference (FoR) and seeks to elucidate the underlying principles for guiding viewers from a signboard to a destination. Using Levinson's tripartite typology of FoR – absolute, relative, and intrinsic – and a VARBRUL analysis, it is shown that each FoR is differentially preferred depending on distinct geographic features of the route and the environment. Specifically, as geographic scale and route complexity increase, there emerges a general tendency away from intrinsic descriptions, through relative descriptions, to absolute descriptions, despite the general low usage of the absolute FoR in modern Japanese. It is argued that the asymmetries in the shift and maintenance of FoRs could be largely, if not wholly, accounted for by using such strategies as “single-perspective” and “absolute-reliance” and properties of “untranslatability.”I wish to thank Shoji Takano, Akiko Kato, and Hiroki Yoshioka for their invaluable comments on the earlier versions of the paper and their technical support on the VARBRUL analyses. My gratitude extends to Jane Hill and the two anonymous reviewers for giving me supportive comments and new insights, and to Hisashi Miura for his extensive assistance in the data collection and coding process. I also greatly benefited from interviews with senior employees at Sankoo Advertising Co., Cutting Kei, and Toyota Kookoku, and from various comments and inquiries from participants in the 11th Meeting of the Japanese Association of Sociolinguistic Sciences, the 37th SIG-SLUD Meeting of the Japanese Society of Artificial Intelligence, and the 28th Open Symposium: “Language” at Aichi University. The research for this article was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) (No. 12610566), 2000–2003 (Japanese Ministry of Education, Science, Sports, and Culture). All misconceptions and errors are of course my own.

This article explores the interconnection between grammar and the performance of preferred and dispreferred responses in Japanese. As is well known, dispreferred format turns are structurally more complex than preferred format turns, regularly delayed, accompanied by prefaces and accounts, mitigated, or made indirect. Owing to the flexibility of Japanese grammar, participants have expanded intra-turn capacity to maximize or minimize compliance with such formats. On one extreme, a dispreferred action can be massively delayed until near the turn-ending through opting for so-called canonical predicate-final word order and minimization of ellipsis. On the other extreme, a preferred action can be expedited to the very opening of a turn through non-canonical predicate-initial word order by taking advantage of word order variability and ellipsis. Such syntactic practices are interactionally managed for calibrating the timing of social action. It emerges that the canonical word order – assumed to be the generically unmarked alternative – is actually optimally tailored for the implementation of marked (dispreferred) responses, as opposed to a non-canonical word order for unmarked (preferred) responses, in the given sequential environment.

In Dominica, rural adults forbid children from speaking Patwa (a French-lexicon creole) in favor of acquiring English (the official language), contributing to a rapid language shift in most villages. However, adults value Patwa for a range of expressive functions and frequently code-switch around and to children. Children increasingly use English but employ Patwa for some functions during peer play when away from adults. This study examines how, despite possible sanctions, children use Patwa to enact particular adult roles during peer play, and what this signifies about their knowledge of role- and place-appropriate language use. Critically, they draw on their verbal resources and physically embodied social action to create imaginary play spaces both organized by and appropriate for Patwa. The examination of children's social worlds provides a more nuanced picture of language shift – and potential maintenance – than observing only adult-adult or adult-child interaction.An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2002 AAA Annual Meeting in New Orleans in a session organized by Marjorie Goodwin and Lourdes de León, “Children socializing children through language: New perspectives on agency, play, and identities.” I thank them for organizing this exciting and timely panel, and for their comments on my paper. I also thank Bambi Schieffelin, Ana Celia Zentella, Tamar Kremer-Sadlik, Carolina Izquierdo, Jane Hill, and two anonymous reviewers for Language in Society for their insightful comments. I am grateful to several organizations which funded the research: the U.S. Department of Education (Fulbright-Hays), the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the National Science Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation. My deepest thanks go to the Dominican children and their families who generously opened their lives to me. I alone take responsibility for any shortcomings here.

This article examines evolving linguistic practices in the Spanish-Rapa Nui (Polynesian) bilingual community of Easter Island, Chile, and in particular the transformation of Rapa Nui Spanish speech styles. The island's rapid integration into the national and world economy and a vibrant indigenous movement have profoundly influenced the everyday lives of island residents. Although community-wide language shift toward Spanish has been evident over the past four decades, the Rapa Nui have in this period also expanded their speech style repertoire by creating Rapa Nui Spanish and syncretic Rapa Nui speech styles. Predominantly Spanish-speaking Rapa Nui children who have imperfect command over Rapa Nui are today adopting a new Rapa Nui Spanish style. Ethnographic and linguistic analysis of recorded face-to-face verbal interactions are utilized to analyze the development, structure, and social significance of Rapa Nui Spanish varieties and to locate them within the complex process of language shift.I wish to express my appreciation to the Rapa Nui and other residents of Easter Island for so kindly welcoming me into their homes and allowing me to participate in their daily life. I would also like to thank my research assistant, Ivonne Calderón Haoa, who helped me record and transcribe speech events. This article is based on field research supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant No. SBR-9313658), the Wenner-Gren Foundation (Grant No. 5670), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Yale University, and the Institute for Intercultural Studies. Parts of this article were presented at the 2004 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America and the 2004 meeting of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania. I thank those who offered comments on earlier versions, in particular two anonymous reviewers, Jane Hill, Robert and Nancy Weber, Christine Jourdan, Niko Besnier, Jean Mitchell, and Lamont Lindstrom.

Janet Holmes & Miriam Meyerhoff (eds.), The handbook of language and gender. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Pp. 776. Pb $44.95.

This extensive collection of articles is testimony to the continuing topicality and diversity of research in language and gender, spanning a wide range of disciplines, theoretical stances, and methodological approaches and examining gender in a vast variety of linguistic, sociocultural and group-specific contexts. Contributors draw on their backgrounds in linguistics, discourse analysis, anthropology, psychology, education, and even information science and thus reflect the interdisciplinary nature and appeal of current language and gender debates. The Handbook is unique in its endeavor to represent a wide range of languages and thus contains some in-depth analyses of and a large number of references to languages other than English, including Greek, French, German, Spanish, Swedish, Italian, Dutch, Gullah Creole, Guyanese Creole, Bislama, Tongan, Tagalog, Malagasy, Lakhota, Japanese, Chinese, Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi, Afrikaans, and Gaelic. This heterogeneity is reinforced by contributions that aim to go beyond a focus on adult, white, heterosexual, middle-class speakers, examining South African gay personal advertisements, the construction of Tongan transgendered identities, or the discursive practices of bilingual Central/Mexican American working-class elementary-school girls and of white Anglo adolescent high-school students from varying social backgrounds. Although the majority of chapters focus on spoken interaction in everyday and in institutional settings, the Handbook also examines grammatical gender and both the construction and the representation of gender in literary and newspaper texts as well as in online communication.

A general address term in Communist China, the Chinese word tongzhi ‘comrade’ was appropriated by gay rights activists in Hong Kong to refer to members of sexual minorities. It has positive connotations of respect, equality, and resistance. This article focuses on the reappropriation of this word by a mainstream newspaper in Hong Kong. The parodic use of tongzhi allows journalists to ridicule gay rights activists so as to increase the entertainment value of news stories. At the same time, it mocks activists' demand for equality and may lead to the pejoration of the term. This study provides synchronic evidence for sociolinguistic accounts that explain how lexical items may undergo pejoration because of the context of their use. It shows that because the meaning potential of a word is not bounded by the intentions of its users, words that marginalized groups have appropriated can be resignified yet again in hateful contexts.An earlier version of this article was presented at the First IGALA (International Gender and Language Association) Conference at Stanford in May 2000 and was published in the proceedings of that conference. I would like to thank Penny Eckert, Jane Hill, Miyako Inoue, Don Kulick, Sally McConnell-Ginet, John Rickford, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

The particle one of Singapore English is widely used in Singapore culture, but it is little mentioned and its invariant meaning has not been described, so that not much is known about its meaning and the cultural norms it reflects. This article provides a detailed semantic analysis of this particle, articulates its meaning in the form of a reductive paraphrase using natural semantic metalanguage, and argues that its use reflects Singapore English speakers' tendency to speak definitively and exaggeratedly. The discussion of Singaporean speech norms reflected by this particle includes reference to relevant Anglo English speech norms for comparison and contrast.I am indebted to Anna Wierzbicka for her detailed comments on an earlier version of this article. I am grateful to Jane Hill, Peter Tan and another, anonymous reviewer for their very generous and constructive overall feedback on this paper. I have also benefited from stimulating discussions with Cynthia Allen and Avery Andrews on the topic of relative clauses and the syntax of the nominal one. Jane McGary provided valuable editorial assistance and native Anglo English speaker intuition in regard to some examples. Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude toward writer Hwee Hwee Tan for giving me a soft copy of her manuscript to do electronic searches.

Recent sociolinguistic studies have given increased attention to the situated practice of members of locally based communities. Linguistic variation examined tends to fall on a continuum between a territorially based “standard” variety and a regional or ethnic vernacular. This article emphasizes the need for sociolinguistics, especially variationist sociolinguistics, to look beyond strictly local contexts and to go beyond treating variation as located along a linear dimension of standard and vernacular. Based on quantitative analysis of four phonological variables among Chinese professionals in foreign and state-owned companies in Beijing, this study demonstrates that professionals in foreign businesses employ linguistic resources from both local and global sources to construct a new cosmopolitan variety of Mandarin, whereas their counterparts in state-owned businesses favor the use of local features. The study shows that variation does not just reflect existing social categories and social change, but is a resource for constructing those categories and participates in social change.This article is based on data collected during my dissertation research on Chinese business professionals, conducted in 1997–1998 in Beijing. The research was funded by several organizations at Stanford University: Graduate Research Opportunity Funds from the School of Humanities and Sciences, a Graduate Dissertation Fellowship from the Institute of Research on Women and Gender, and a Dissertation Grant for the Study of Women in Asia from the Center for East Asian Studies. My special thanks to Penelope Eckert and Keith Walters for their valuable suggestions on various versions of this article. I would also like to thank Miyako Inoue for her insightful comments on my analysis of the linguistic markets in the Chinese context. I am grateful for the valuable suggestions and comments from Jane Hill, editor of Language and Society, and two anonymous reviewers. I would also like to thank Jane McGary, the editorial assistant of LIS, for her editorial support. My research and this article would not have been possible without the Chinese professionals who agreed to share their experiences and time with me during my fieldwork. All remaining errors are my own.

This article analyzes the connections between the oral genres displayed by Gitano (Spanish Gypsy) children and adults during religious instruction classes at an Evangelist church and the writings produced by Gitano children in an after-school computer program in the same community. Results are discussed in relation to two strands of received assumptions regarding Gypsy culture and recent theoretical insights in the study of literacy and discourse. On one hand, previous portraits of Gitano culture as exclusively oral need to be revised, in line with a more social and situated perspective on literacy. On the other, the results are a basis for critical examination of dominant explanations regarding the educational failure of Gitano children, an argument that highlights the importance of engaging intratextual linguistic analysis with discussions of the social and institutional orders.We first thank the research participants for their warm welcome to the different sites that are part of this study. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for their comments. This study began when David Poveda worked in the School of Education and Humanities of the University of Castilla-La Mancha, where Ana Cano and Manuel Palomares-Valera completed their training. The research project was funded by the University of Castilla-La Mancha through an internal research grant (Principal Investigator: Beatriz Martín).