Contemporary social identities are hybrid and complex, and the media play a crucial role in their construction. A shift from political identities based on citizenship to economic ones based on participation in a global consumer market can be observed, together with a concomitant shift from monolingual practices to multilingual and English-dominant ones. This transformation is here explored in a corpus of German advertisements. Multilingual advertisements accounted for 60–70% of all advertisements released on various television networks and in two national newspapers in 1999. The subject positions that are created by multilingual narrators and multilingual narratees are characterized by drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism, and on point-of-view more generally. In order to test the acceptance of or resistance to these identity constructions outside the discourse of commercial advertising, the uses of multilingualism in nonprofit and personal advertising are also explored. All these discourses valorize German–English bilingualism and set it up as the strongest linguistic currency for the German business elite.

Stylization is the knowing deployment of culturally familiar styles and identities that are marked as deviating from those predictably associated with the current speaking context. Dialect stylization involves performing non-current-first-person personas by phonological and related means, sometimes in play or parody. Although these processes may seem to be very local, it is arguably true that dialects are increasingly experienced in reflexive and mediated environments that breed stylization. One of these is light entertainment on radio; this article analyzes data from English-language national radio broadcasts in Wales. Welshness is self-consciously evoked in the data, partly through dialect performance, where the variables (ou) and (ei) are a rich semiotic resource, linked to nondialectal means of evoking Welsh cultural stances and practices. Although stylization is a form of strategic de-authentication, its ultimate relationship with authenticity is complex. As a facet of cultural performance, stylization can be part of a process of cultural reproduction, and I argue that this is the best interpretation of the present data. As a result, sociolinguistics may need to reconsider its assumptions about cultural authenticity.

This article lends empirical support to the notion that quoted speech is “constructed dialogue” by exploring empirically how narratives of personal experience involve creative performance of locally imaginable personas, rather than accurate or faithful representation of actual people and their words. This work examines quotation in narratives of personal experience as a site where speakers use language pragmatically to enact socio-culturally locatable identities. Using a corpus of narratives in which French–Portuguese bilinguals told the same narratives of personal experience once in each language, it demonstrates that speakers do not quote more extensively when recounting experiences in the language in which those events “originally” occurred. Ultimately, what differs most in speakers' quotations in French and Portuguese tellings of the “same event” are the nonequivalent kinds and ranges of registers in which narrated characters are quoted. More specifically, speakers are more likely to quote themselves as speaking or having spoken in creative, marked registers in French than in Portuguese. This difference in the registers put in the mouths of quoted characters, in particular of quoted selves, may point to ways in which these bilinguals' multiple identities are instantiated within and across their two languages. More broadly, this work reveals ways in which all speakers may use narrative not only to describe the past but also to perform a variety of cultural selves, reinventing and reenacting characters as quoted selves and others.

Although the methodologies for describing many types of linguistic variation have been well developed, satisfactory theoretical links between data and explanation – especially links that include causal mechanisms – remain lacking. This article argues, somewhat paradoxically, that even though most choices reflect some societal pattern, speakers make linguistic choices as individuals. That is, choices ultimately lie with the individual and are rationally based. Rational Choice Models (e.g. Elster 1979, 1989, 1997) provide explanatory mechanisms for the ways actors in society select from alternative structures and available options. The Rational Choice approach taken here is enhanced by diverse theories of human action (e.g. Damasio 1996, Klein 1998, Lessig 1995). Analysis of codeswitching examples within a recasting of the Markedness Model (Myers-Scotton, e.g. 1993, 1998) suggests how a rationally based model offers better explanations for linguistic variation than do other approaches.

This article employs conversation analysis to investigate the role of adverbials in Japanese talk-in-interaction for the projection of further talk and some implications this has for interactional styles. Through examination of naturally occurring talk, it is first observed that a typical usage of adverbials is in some position preceding the predicate, although they are also appended as post-predicate additions. Second, when adverbials are produced prior to a predicate, evidently they can strongly project a forthcoming predicate within the particular interactional context. Given the importance of predicates within Japanese turns, adverbials have a major part to play, not only in assisting participants to foreshadow a probable unfolding of an utterance, but also to enable recipients to achieve early alignment with emerging talk and to expedite the implementation of subsequent actions. These features are shown to be a powerful resource in the facilitation of seemingly implicit styles of communication.

From a strict linguistic viewpoint, code-switching intertwines with a diverse range of language contact phenomena, from strict interference to several kinds of language mixture. Code-switching has also been addressed as an interactional phenomenon in everyday talk, an approach that implies a synchronic perspective. In this article, however, data are drawn from the records of communicative practices left behind by Catalan Jewish communities of the 14th and 15th centuries. These communities lived under well-defined cultural, political, and social conditions and displayed a rather complex linguistic repertoire of both linguistic resources and verbal genres. I analyze two of these verbal genres, which themselves must be viewed in the context of a broader Hispano-Arabic cultural tradition; they draw on a heteroglot background in which Semitic and Romance languages merged. In this analysis of the functions that code-switching played in these verbal practices, a contrast emerges between the use of code-switching and lexical borrowing (or alternation vs. insertional types of code-switching) in both verbal genres. This has implications for a much debated issue – the alleged existence of a medieval Catalan Jewish language – and challenges the idea that forms of linguistic practice must always be reduced to a bounded code.

The present study demonstrates how prosody – specifically, onset level – is deployed in situated interaction to cue frames of interpretation for talk. It shows not only that final pitch level in intonational contours is a relevant parameter, but also that, under certain conditions, initial pitch level may provide a situationally specific contextualization cue. In calls to radio phone-in programs, for instance, there is a so-called anchor position where callers can be expected to announce the reason for their calls. Close empirical analysis of data from such a program reveals that it is here that the first turn-constructional unit is routinely formatted with high onset. The studio moderator displays an orientation to this kind of prosodic formatting by withholding further talk until the caller has made a recognizably complete statement of the reason for the call. On occasion, turn-constructional units in anchor position are heard to lack a high onset. When this happens, the moderator responds in a way that shows he is not treating callers' talk as the reason for the call, but rather as a preface to the statement of reason.

More than 13,000 scientists from the former Soviet Union have arrived in Israel since 1988. The purpose of this study is to analyze certain factors that influence immigrant scientists' integration into the society and academic community of Israel, with special attention to multilingual identity. Previous studies in this field emphasize the significance of Hebrew and juxtaposed Russian with Hebrew; however, in Israel, especially in the educated classes, English is an important status symbol and boundary marker. The data demonstrate that English is crucial in shaping the patterns of immigrants\' social integration. Results of statistical tests demonstrate significant differences between those who studied English and those who studied either German or French regarding feelings of personal self-actualization and job satisfaction. Moreover, command of English proved to be the determining factor for risk of losing a job. The implication is that Israeli language policy, which has traditionally taken the acquisition of Hebrew by immigrants as its major goal, should be reformulated to include access to English instruction, since without it they are unlikely to become equal members of the Israeli middle class.

This article discusses Turkish-German bilingual children's intonation patterns as they relate to processes of contact-induced language change. Bilingual speakers use two distinct rises in both Turkish and German. One rise (L*HH%) resembles a characteristic German rise, while the other (L%H%) resembles a characteristic Turkish rise. The rises pattern pragmatically in ways that are non-normative for both Turkish and German. Although this pattern is not clearly attributable to language interference (either borrowing or shift-induced language change), it is certainly the result of language contact. Fusion is proposed to account for the two-way influence between the two languages.

The study of lyric epiphany, essential to any coordination of sociolinguistics and literature, is defined in terms of five considerations (e.g., its role in political rhetoric), and linguistic criteria such as phonic compression. One track in the argument deals with lyric epiphany in ordinary language (e.g., M.L. King's speeches), in prose (e.g., Cather and Tolstoy), and in the long poem. The second, intermittently intersecting track consists of intense analyses of four cases of linguistic epiphany in The Odyssey that involve (1) semantically ramifying root symbols such as the olive in Greece, (2) simile concentration, as in the reverse similes that commute antithetical subcategories, (3) phonic texturing (e.g., alliteration, phonaesthesia), and as a limiting case, (4) epiphany through chiasmus. The conclusions suggest the universal, cross-language and cross-cultural reality of lyric epiphany (e.g., not just classic Russian and Homeric Greek, but Quechua, Eskimo, and Sanskrit and Hebrew religious texts). Lyric epiphany is a subtype of generic epiphany: an intuition or revelation of truth values beyond language and empirical experience. Lyric epiphany, while a component of classical poetics – both Western and Eastern – and a subcategory of ideologies of Primitivism and, within that, of Modernism, is also, like the human body, part of the human experience that can and should be studied as part of cultural linguistics and sociolinguistics.

This article provides an overview of the dynamics of answering and resisting or evading questions in broadcast news interviews. After a preliminary examination of the practices through which answers are recognizably constructed, the analysis turns to the practices through which interviewees manage responses that resist the agenda of an interviewer's question. When resisting overtly, interviewees engage in various forms of “damage control.” When resisting covertly, interviewees take steps to render the resistance less conspicuous. Both sets of practices facilitate resistant responses by reducing the negative consequences that might otherwise follow. Such practices demonstrate that, although interviewees have developed practices for resisting questions, the norm of answering remains a salient feature of the contemporary broadcast news interview.

Although the subject of gender sensitivity has been under investigation for some time in language for general purposes (LGP), this subject has not been explored in any great detail in the context of language for special purposes (LSP). There are numerous guidelines available for term formation, but the issue of gender sensitivity is not typically addressed by these guidelines. This article presents a corpus-based study of the terminology of the subject field of infertility, with a view to establishing the nature and degree of gender insensitivity currently present in that subject field and recommending extensions to term formation and usage guidelines to make them more gender-sensitive.

This article examines complaint sequences that terminate with one party's walking out, unilaterally, on the other. The analysis of three such extended sequences, using the Conversation Analytic approach, reveals interactional parallels among them. The complaints that precede the walkouts are constructed so as to identify deleterious and generic personal deficiencies. As these sequences develop, they come to focus on faults in the current behavior of those involved. In their final stages, the actions of the leavers appear sensitive to the persistence of behavior that has been deemed to be at fault. This combination of features seems connected to both the unilateral departure and the state of indignation that also becomes evidently present. This invites comparison with other forms of antagonistic dispute, such as those that lead to certain instances of murder.

This article argues that certain aspects of language use may be more resistant to change than is language code. In communities undergoing language shift, researchers have noted ways in which indigenous patterns of interaction may be retained after the language used has shifted to English. It is argued that aspects of a speech community's interaction that are most tacit are also the most resistant to change, and are maintained through mundane routines and forms of everyday interaction. Such contexts for language use typically are the focus in studies of language socialization, which bring the theoretical perspectives of both practice theory and Bakhtinian dialogicality to bear on the question of how interactional and linguistic routines are maintained and transmitted across generations. Analysis here focuses on one particular interactional routine: the giving of directives involving a triadic participation structure, between caregivers and children in a Navajo community.

It is argued that a grammaticization perspective affords insights on the problem of functional equivalence in variables “above and beyond phonology.” This is a study of variation between aspectual expressions involving Spanish estar ‘be located’ and andar ‘go around’ + gerund. An analysis of Mexican oral corpora shows both linguistic and social conditioning: Each auxiliary is favored by certain classes of main verbs, and andar is favored in popular varieties. Semantic bleaching along parallel paths results in layering in the domain of progressive aspect, while retention results in synchronic distribution patterns congruent with the original meaning of the source constructions. Thus, once meaningful aspectual differences become distributional routines. At the same time, the patterning of verbs denoting outdoor activities with andar leads to social differences and the association of this variant with rural and popular varieties.

This article explores the effects of ethnic stereotypes, demographic shifts, and nationalism on language choice in the town of Dangriga, Belize. Dangriga was founded during the nineteenth century by members of an ethnic minority of West African and Native American heritage, known as the Garinagu or Garifuna. Today, it is a multilingual and multiethnic town populated primarily by Garinagu, Belizean Creoles, and both native-born and foreign-born Spanish speakers. In this context, language choice is in part a question of affiliation with a variety of ethnic and national identities. This article examines the manner in which ethnic and national stereotypes and images, as well as current demographic shifts in the Belizean population, affect language choice in multilingual contexts. Particular attention is paid to the position of young Garinagu vis-à-vis the Garifuna language and Belizean English Creole.

In South Africa, the transition from an apartheid regime to a popularly elected government in 1994 made possible wide-ranging changes in power relations in every sphere of human interaction, including language. Under the new political dispensation, there are 11 official languages (listed in order of numbers of speakers): Zulu, Xhosa, Afrikaans, Tswana, North Sotho, English, South Sotho, Tsonga, Swati, Ndebele, and Venda. They replace English and Afrikaans, formerly the 2 official languages.

These two books are indeed similar in that they cover related topics, have overlapping contributors, and bear the unmistakable stamp of the linguistic rights duo, Tove Skutnabb-Kangas and Robert Phillipson. Rights to language is a Festschrift to mark Skutnabb-Kangas's sixtieth birthday. It parades a star-studded list of contributors, particularly in the field of sociolinguistics; however, as with most books of this genre, the contributions are uneven in quality and scope. The 47 chapters in the book are contributed by 51 authors, and, according to the editor, 20 other invited scholars were unable to contribute. This ambitious goal – to include as many of the honoree's friends as possible – has had the unfortunate effect of making several authors produce brief, less than adequate expositions of their topics.

Why does linguistic diversity exist? This is the question to which this book is addressed. Nettle argues that, although aspects of the diversity of languages have been studied, the reason for this diversity has not been a subject of attention. To answer the question, he suggests that a multidisciplinary approach is necessary – a broad linguistic anthropology in which the linguistic map is explained by people's social behavior, which in turn arises largely from their ecological situation.

Spoken Soul is a very stimulating book to read, informative and solidly grounded in scholarship from several disciplines, including quantitative sociolinguistics, sociology, socioeconomic history, and African American literature. It exemplifies the contribution that linguistic research on African American English (AAE) can make to African American studies. It is also a model for how scholarly findings can be shared with the lay public in a language that is vivid and accessible. Those who are familiar with AAE will appreciate the fact that this vividness is borrowed from the subject matter itself. Thus, the authors demonstrate implicitly that AAE is not an impoverished vernacular, and even scholarly discourse can benefit from it.