Although it is well accepted that linguistic naming conventions provide valuable insights into the social and linguistic perceptions of people, this topic has not received much attention in sociolinguistics. Studies focus on the etymology of names, details about the social and historical circumstances of their emergence, and their users, and sometimes make recommendations about the appropriateness of terms. This article departs from this tradition. Focusing on the term “Takitaki” in French Guiana, it shows that an analysis of the discursive uses of language names by all local actors provides significant insights into the social and linguistic makeup of a complex sociolinguistic situation. Descriptions of languages in such settings should be based on the varieties identified by such an analysis and on practices in a range of naturalistic interactions. Based on these analytical steps, the authors propose a multi-perspective approach to language documentation.We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor of this journal for valuable comments and criticisms on an earlier version of this article. All remaining errors are, of course, our own responsibility.

This article demonstrates how cultural ideologies of language, and the semiotic processes that mobilize them, manifest in contemporary American drug treatment. Drawing from an ethnographic study of an outpatient program in the Midwestern United States, it focuses on therapists' claims about what constitutes “healthy language.” It is argued that these claims both stem from and actively reproduce an “ideology of inner reference,” which presumes that “healthy” language refers to preexisting phenomena, and that the phenomena to which it refers are internal to speakers. By formally discouraging talk that could point outside the parameters of the individual psyche, the treatment program effectively insulates itself from clients' critiques and challenges. A broad attempt is made to elucidate the connection between a language ideology that enjoys wide cultural circulation as well as significant currency in contemporary clinical practice, and a particular political effect called “institutional insulation.”My thanks to Barbara Johnstone and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful, critical comments on an earlier version of this article. I am especially grateful to James Wilce for his keen advice on how to refine central elements of the argument and his guidance toward relevant, fruitful literature. The following people contributed significantly to the essay's development (though its remaining flaws are very much my own): Giorgio Bertellini, Webb Keane, Daniel Listoe, Beth Reed, Douglas Rogers, Michael Sosin, and Sarah Womack. I'd also like to thank the University of Chicago Anthropology Department, Center for Gender Studies, Committee on Human Development, and School of Social Service Administration for opportunities to present (and rethink) earlier versions. The research reported here was conducted with the support of a training fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health and various grants from the Department of Anthropology, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Program in Women's Studies, Rackham Graduate School, and the School of Social Work, all at the University of Michigan. This essay is for “Lila.”

On the basis of data collected during a year-long study of a Congressional campaign in California in the mid-1990s, this article uses semantic, pragmatic, and narrative analysis to show how candidates for political office construct and defend the coherence of their actions, including their choice to run for office. First, semantic and pragmatic analysis is used to discuss two charges of lack of coherence against one candidate. Second, three discursive strategies used by candidates for building existential coherence are identified: (i) constructing a narrative of belonging; (ii) casting the present as a natural extension of the past; and (iii) exposing potential contradictions in order to show how to solve them. After examining the extent to which each strategy is common across candidates and situations, it is shown that candidates who frame themselves as “independent” tend to use these strategies more than those who choose to identify more closely with a party's platform and ideology.The research on which this article is based was in part supported by two small grants from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1996–1997 and 1997–1998, and by a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship supplemented by funds from UCLA during the 1999–2000 academic year. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Discourse Lab in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA on 2 June 2004. I thank my colleagues and students for their generous feedback and comments. Among my research assistants over the years, special thanks go to Jeff Storey, Sarah Meacham, and Jennifer Reynolds for their help in transcribing the talk in dozens of videotapes I recorded. I am also indebted to Anjali Browning for her careful reading of the first draft of this article. Some of the data and ideas presented in this article were first introduced in a number of seminars, workshops, and conferences at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” the University of Florence, and the University of California at Santa Barbara. I would like to thank the participants in those events for their engagement with this material and their comments. I am also grateful to Jane Hill, former editor of Language in Society, and three anonymous reviewers for specific suggestions on how to improve the organization and content of the article. A number of people made the project on which this article is based possible and a rewarding experience. First and foremost, I am deeply indebted to the late Walter Capps and to his wife Lois Capps – now Rep. Lois Capps (D-California) – and to their extended family for letting me enter their home and giving me access to their lives as they experienced an extraordinary series of events. I am also very grateful to Walter's brother, Doug Capps, who was Walter's campaign manager in 1996 and has continued over the years to be my liaison with the rest of the Capps family. Others members of the Capps-for-Congress campaign staff I could rely on for information include Bryant Wieneke, always most generous with his time, Steve Boyd, Thu Fong, and Lindsey Capps. After Walter Capps's death, I benefited from conversations with Capps's colleague and friend Richard Hecht, professor and former chair of the Department of Religious Studies at UCSB. I am also grateful to the 1995–1996 Independent candidate Steven Wheeler, who, in June 1998, consented to meet with me and to being interviewed. This project was born out of conversations with Walter Capps's daughter Lisa while she was a graduate student at UCLA. She remained a strong supporter of my efforts to capture her father's adventure in politics after she accepted a position in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and even during the last year of her life, as she struggled with cancer. This article is dedicated to her memory.

This article examines the influence of language ideology on interactions between English-speaking Anglo and monolingual Spanish-speaking employees in an Anglo-owned Mexican restaurant in Texas. In directives to Spanish-speaking employees, Anglo managers typically use English with elements of Mock Spanish. Because the Anglo managers fail to question whether their limited use of Spanish is sufficient for communicative success, Spanish speakers are almost always held responsible for incidents resulting from miscommunication. For Latino workers, Spanish provides an alternative linguistic market in which Spanish operates as a form of solidarity and resistance. The competing functions of Spanish serve to reinforce racial segregation and inequality in the workplace.I am greatly indebted to the restaurant workers who shared their experiences and opinions with me. For helpful discussions and comments, I would like to thank Eriko Atagi, Mary Bucholtz, Elaine Chun, Erin Debenport, Jane Hill, Jennifer Palmer, Robin Queen, Otto Santa Ana, Teresa Satterfield, Keith Walters, Albert Zapata, and an anonymous reviewer.

An ethnographic approach to language aims at explaining the organization of a verbal culture, understood as the result of speakers' practices and agency. The instrument of this research is fieldwork. For the verbal cultures of bygone societies, only examination of written records helps us to guess how speaking worked at the time. This general issue is addressed by scrutinizing a medieval Catalan chronicle. Ethnographic and pragmatic concepts are projected backward on data informative on face-to-face communication and the interactional construction of a social order. Speakers' rights and obligations, their metalinguistic and metapragmatic management of verbal resources (genres, texts, codeswitching), and the link between linguistic management and ideologies are uncovered. The article focuses on the relationship among evidence, knowledge and reporting of events, and the production and reproduction of authority in Catalan medieval society, as well as the different types of responsibility in discourse and their patterns of social distribution. Concentration is on three types of discourse events: delegated discourse, mediated communication, and a specific type of codeswitching in political oratory, quotation cum auctoritate.The research on which this article is based was funded by the Department of Research, Universities and Information Society, Generalitat de Catalunya, and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, Research Fund BFF2003-02954. I benefited from a visiting scholar stay at the University of California, Berkeley (spring–summer 2003). I am indebted to two anonymous reviewers who helped to imprive this article. Particular thanks go to Jane McGary, who patiently helped in editing the manuscript and making it a more readable text.

A micro-discourse-based approach is employed to examine the usage of nonparticle questions (e.g., ii? ‘{Is that} okay?’) in Japanese university orchestra meetings. Women appear to ask such questions more often than men do there. It is shown that a detailed discourse analysis, including participants' talk, nonvocal behaviors, and the use of documents, can uncover how superficially sex-linked usage arises from differences in speakers' activities at the moment. By means of both sequential and quantitative analyses of 140 nonparticle questions, it is demonstrated that their use with different frequencies by women and men is not a direct consequence of the sex of the speaker per se. Rather, the speakers' engagement in activities specific to particular discourses (e.g., note-taking) affects their opportunities to ask nonparticle questions.I would like to express my appreciation to my former academic adviser, Amy Sheldon of the University of Minnesota, and to the other members of my dissertation committee, Junko Mori, Betsy Kerr, Jeanette Gundel, and Bruce Downing, for their invaluable comments on earlier versions of this article. I am also grateful to the editor of the journal and two anonymous reviewers of this article who helped me to refocus the argumentation. I also appreciate the help of Anthony Backhouse, Marjorie Harness Goodwin, Jane Hill, Noël R. Houck, Hiroaki Ishiguro, Etsuko Oishi, and Tomoharu Yanagimachi, who gave me useful and insightful suggestions. I also thank Anne-Marie Cusac and Jane McGary, who made many stylistic changes. I am solely responsible for any problems that remain in this article. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2001 annual meeting of American Association for Applied Linguistics in St. Louis, Missouri. A related but different article concerning functions of nonparticle questions appeared as Okada 2005 in the Bulletin of Fuji Women's University 42 (Series I).

This article examines data drawn from a 2001 Ontario (Canada) provincial inquiry into the deaths of seven people as a result of water contamination in a small Ontario town. The examination focuses on question-answer sequences in which the premier of Ontario, Michael Harris, attempted to resist lawyers' attempts to control and restrict his responses. In particular, on the basis of the data it is argued that the power of cross-examining lawyers does not reside solely in their ability to ask controlling and restrictive questions of witnesses, but rather is crucially dependent on their ability to compel witnesses to produce straightforward, or “type-conforming,” answers to these controlling and restrictive questions. The witness whose testimony is analyzed was not compelled to produce answers that logically conformed to the form of the lawyers' questions (i.e., “yes” or “no”) and, as a result, often usurped control over the topical agenda of the proceedings. In this sense, the present work builds on Eades's conclusion that “we cannot rely on question form to discover how witnesses are controlled.”A previous version of this article was presented at Sociolinguistics Symposium 15, Newcastle, U.K., in April 2004. We thank audience members at that conference and two reviewers for Language in Society for comments on previous versions. The research on which this article is based was funded in part by a SSHRCC Regular Research Grant (#410-2000-1330) to the first author.

Despite a growing body of cross-cultural ethnographic research in religious enclave communities, we know little about the everyday discursive practices by which women caregivers socialize children to morally reject much of contemporary society. This article draws on ethnographic and linguistic research conducted in a Brooklyn (New York) neighborhood from 1995 through 1997 to discuss how Hasidic women caregivers rehearse a particular stance to faith with young children by examining socialization routines in which Hasidic children display culturally unacceptable ways of speaking: questioning, requesting or challenging authority figures. An unusual consistency of message across a range of socialization contexts supports caregivers' (mothers' and teachers') efforts to teach their children the morality of communal hierarchies of authority and difference. Hasidic women encourage their children to “fit in” to communal hierarchies of age, gender, and religious practice and to reject what they present as “Gentile” ways of behaving and communicating. When children make certain requests, ask culturally unacceptable questions, or challenge caregiver authority, caregivers invoke the moral authority of community practices and social roles. Through appeals to a higher authority, essentializing difference and morality, silence, shaming, or threat of exclusion, Hasidic children are presented with a type of faith which parallels communal authority with divine authority. An approach to religious enclave communities that is framed by the language socialization research paradigm can link everyday micro processes of talk with broader global processes shaping contemporary religious movements.Thanks go to Bambi Schieffelin, Peter Schneider, Samuel C. Heilman, Adam Idelson, Patrick Moynihan, Lotti Silber, Faye Ginsberg, Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, and Jim Wilson for their time, insights, and support (technical and otherwise). This article grew out of a shorter version I presented at an invited session Paul Garrett and I organized for the American Anthropological Association 1997 meetings, at which Elinor Ochs was a valuable discussant. I presented a more recent version at the Michigan Seminar on Social Identity (2003) thanks to Bambi Schieffelin's invitation. The broader research on which this article is based was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, National Science Foundation, Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture, Spencer Foundation, Lucius Littauer Foundation, and National Foundation for Jewish Culture. I am very grateful for the support. Thanks to the teachers, students, and administrators at the Hasidic girls' school, Bnos Yisroel, and the women who invited me into their homes. Special thanks to the first-grade teacher, Mrs. Weiss, whose graciousness makes her a role model for Jews, Gentiles, and everyone else.

This article links the use of you know in a group of mostly working-class London adolescents (WCG) and I know in a mostly middle-class group (MCG) to Foucault's notion of power/knowledge and, by extension, to group-specific (re)production of dominant discourses and power relations. Speakers in WCG use you know clause-finally to mark the information in that clause, which tends to be about the deviance of others, as dominant. Speakers in MCG use I know either clause-initially or as a stand-alone item in reaction to the previous speaker's utterance and to mark that utterance as dominant. Thus, the use of you know shows relatively active identity construction while the use of I know shows relatively reactive identity construction, but both groups construct their identities indirectly: WCG because they talk about others, and MCG because they react to others. Relations between these processes and class and gender identities are discussed.

This study examines the co-construction of five successful gatekeeping encounters. Drawing from a database of employment interviews, the emically derived concept of trustworthiness is identified as a key determiner in the success or failure of job candidates. Three critical, potentially problematic moves are identified: supplying inappropriate references, demanding too high a salary, and failing to account for gaps in one's work history. What distinguishes the successful from the failed interviews is not the frequency of these potentially damaging occurrences but the compensatory characteristics of those encounters in which trust (and subsequent success) is established. The successful candidates vary widely in terms of second language ability (in the case of nonnative speakers of English) and work experience. What they share, however, is the ability to present themselves positively, to establish rapport/solidarity with their interlocutor, and to demonstrate flexibility regarding job requirements and preferences. Both linguistic and nonlinguistic features are examined.I am grateful to Gabriele Kasper and Claire Kramsch, who provided me with numerous critical and insightful comments on earlier versions of this article. The data analyzed here come from the database that was used for my dissertation research (2001). Attempts have been made to reflect the constructive, and much appreciated, criticisms of two insightful anonymous reviewers of an earlier version of this article.

Contrary to statements made by previous researchers, Muskogee women are linguistically active in ceremonial public spheres, though through the use of genres that differ significantly from men's. One of the genres performed in these contexts is “gossip,” which is described by some Muskogee men as a dangerous genre. This article explores why Muskogee women's and men's linguistic practices differ so strikingly in the ceremonial sphere, and what women achieve through their use of gossip. It is suggested that consideration of Muskogee language and gender ideologies in regard to these issues shows that gendered language use differences are rational and maintain balance between the genders. Insights from both ideologies also indicate that women's gossip is a powerful genre, the use of which is generally positive for Muskogee society.I would like to thank Linda Alexander, Bertha Tilkens, John Proctor, and other members of the Muskogee community who have allowed me to attend and be part of their interactions. I also would like to express my appreciation to the reviewers of this manuscript for their insightful comments.

This article investigates two types of preference organization in interaction: in response to a question that selects a next speaker in multi-party interaction, the preference for answers over non-answer responses as a category of a response; and the preference for selected next speakers to respond. It is asserted that the turn allocation rule specified by Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson (1974) which states that a response is relevant by the selected next speaker at the transition relevance place is affected by these two preferences once beyond a normal transition space. It is argued that a “second-order” organization is present such that interactants prioritize a preference for answers over a preference for a response by the selected next speaker. This analysis reveals an observable preference for progressivity in interaction.Thank you to Nick Enfield, Steve Levinson and Manny Schegloff for useful discussions about the phenomena discussed in this article, and to John Heritage for his careful reading and comments on earlier drafts. Portions of this article were presented at the 2002 Western States Communication Association convention, Long Beach, California, and at the Workshop on Feedback in Interaction at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, in February 2004.

This article sketches the effects of 100 years of missionary presence on how people in the San Carlos Apache community regard language and the idea of a “language expert.” Evangelical Christian practice demands an Apache language emptied of all indexical associations with non-Christian Apache cultural practices. The reservation is home to perhaps two dozen missions and churches, each of which takes a slightly different view of the role of Apache language and culture in religious practice. In an exploration of the translation practices of Phillip Goode, a San Carlos Apache interpreter, and of early Lutheran missionaries on the reservation, it is argued that Bible translation is a key factor in shifting ideas about language as a purely referential system on the reservation. This shifting language ideology has repercussions on how people in the community consider the prospects for language revitalization.This article was delivered in earlier versions to anthropology colloquia at Yale University, at Hamilton College, and at the University of Massachusetts. I thank Joseph Errington, Bernard Bate, Harold Conklin, Eleanor Nevins, Bonnie Urciuoli, Enoch Page, Jacqueline Urla, and Roy Wright, both for helping to arrange the presentations and for their generous critiques of the content. Willem de Reuse offered cogent comments and morphosyntactic advice. James Wilce gave careful comments on two versions of the manuscript. Thanks to Jane Hill and Barbara Johnstone, as well as the anonymous reviewers from this journal, for their splendid and productive advice. I also heartily thank the teachers and staff of the St. Charles Elementary School, Peridot Lutheran Day School, and Rice Elementary School for their insights and assistance in the preparation of this essay. As always I remain grateful to the Goode family for their continued friendship and encouragement. All errors and omissions remain my own.

This study investigates the construction of linguistic modernity via English mixing in the discourse of Korean television commercials. Specifically, it is concerned with Korean-English bilinguals' linguistic construction of modernity as realized in three domains of advertising: technology, gender roles, and taste as a cultural form. Four hours of commercials were video-taped in Seoul, South Korea, during weekend prime time from August through October 2002. A total of 720 advertising spots were analyzed. The findings suggest that mixing English with Korean is a linguistic mechanism for the construction of modernity in contemporary South Korea. It is argued that knowledge and use of English in South Korea is a defining linguistic expression of modernity, and the conspicuous total absence of English is linguistically disassociated from modernity.A preliminary version of the paper was presented at Sociolinguistic Symposium 15, April 1–4, 2004, at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. My sincere thanks to Rakesh Bhatt, Ingrid Piller, Elizabeth Martin and Tej Bhatia for their comments and suggestions on earlier versions. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor for their comments, and Alice Filmer for her assistance with copyediting.

Scholars have long understood that linkages between the identities of actors and the design of their actions in interaction constitute one of the central mechanisms by which social patterns are produced. Although a range of empirical approaches has successfully grounded claims regarding the significance of various forms or types of identity (gender, sex, race, ethnicity, class, familial status, etc.) in almost every form of social organization, these analyses have mostly focused on aggregated populations, aggregated interactions, or historical periods that have been (in different ways) abstracted from the particulars of singular episodes of interaction. By contrast, establishing the mechanisms by which a specific identity is made relevant and consequential in any particular episode of interaction has remained much more elusive. This article develops a range of general analytic resources for explicating how participants in an interaction can make relevant and consequential specific identities in particular courses of action. It then illustrates the use of these analytic resources by examining a phone call between two friends, one of whom relevantly embodies “grandparent” as an identity. The conclusion offers observations prompted by this analysis regarding basic contingencies that characterize self-other relationships, and the role of generic grammatical resources in establishing specific identities and intimate relationships.

This article examines how the official legal record, presumably an institutional space consisting of Standard American English (SAE), can become a record of a regional variety of English. Utilizing theory from language contact situations, interactional sociolinguistics, and critical discourse analysis, it describes and explains how a prestigious societal institution, often analyzed as imposing its powerful voice on those less powerful, exhibits some permeability as it absorbs at least a few discursive representations of a less dominant bilingual and bicultural group. Traces of the Spanish-English contact situation, biculturalism, and Latino life find their way into the official discursive space via stereotype, topic, lexical items, prepositions, and some verbal constructions. The discussion covers why some legal arenas are more impervious to linguistic and cultural diversity (or “accented English”) than are others. The conclusion discusses what such representations might mean for Latina women.The National Science Foundation's Law and Social Science Program (SBR#-9709938) and the Social Science Research Council's Sexuality Research Fellowship Program provided funding for data collection for this study. I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and Barbara Johnstone for their comments and critiques on earlier versions of this article. While any remaining errors or oversights are mine alone, the reviewers' and editor's linguistic knowledge and insight have helped to make the work stronger and clearer. Also, I am grateful to Florida State University's Winthrop-King Foundation for paying Ms. Shelley Bayless to help me codify and count data. And finally, I must thank my mother, Angela M. Trinch, for being there when both of my children were born so that I could work on this article.

This study investigates the organization of conversational interaction via push-to-talk mobile radios. Operating like long-range walkie-talkies, the mobile radios mediate a remote state of incipient talk; at the push of a button, speakers can initiate, engage, disengage, and reengage turn-by-turn talk. Eight friends used the mobile radios for one week; 50 of their conversational exchanges were analyzed using conversation analytic methods. The findings describe the contour of their conversational exchanges: how turn-by-turn talk is engaged, sustained, and disengaged. Similar to a continuing state of incipient talk in copresence, opening and closing sequences are rare. Instead, speakers engage turn-by-turn talk by immediately launching the purpose of the call. Speakers disengage turn-by-turn talk by orienting to the relevance of a lapse at sequence completion. Once engaged, the mobile radio system imposes silence between speakers' turns at talk, giving them a resource for managing a remote conversation amid ongoing copresent activities.We are grateful to Mimi and her friends for making it possible to collect this data. We also thank Jim Thornton, Marilyn Whalen, Paul Drew, Bob Moore and Luke Plurkowski for their helpful insights.

This article examines some issues facing the fieldworker attempting to observe and record “natural” conversations, and it reconsiders the long-held sociolinguistic notion of the observer's paradox by recasting it within Allan Bell's framework of audience design theory. Style shifting in observed and recorded speech events is seen to be influenced by speakers' perception of the fieldworker's social role, and by the fieldworker's participant role in the speech event.An earlier and much briefer version of this article was presented at the 2002 Berkeley Linguistics Society conference. I am most grateful to Barbara Johnstone, Jane Hill, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments. Funding for this fieldwork was provided by grants from the International Research and Exchange Board, the Academy for Educational Development, and the Berkeley Program in Post-Soviet Studies.

This article describes linguistic features used to depict fictional American Indian speech, a style referred to as “Hollywood Injun English,” found in movies, on television, and in some literature (the focus is on the film and television varieties). Grammatically, it draws on a range of nonstandard features similar to those found in “foreigner talk” and “baby talk,” as well a formalized, ornate variety of English; all these features are used to project or evoke certain characteristics historically associated with “the White Man's Indian.” The article also exemplifies some ways in which these linguistic features are deployed in relation to particular characteristics stereotypically associated with American Indians, and shows how the correspondence between nonstandard, dysfluent speech forms and particular pejorative aspects of the fictional Indian characters subtly reproduce Native American otherness in contemporary popular American culture.I would like to thank the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the University of Michigan for their support. This manuscript has also benefited from the following individuals' comments and suggestions: Gerald Carr, Eve Danziger, Philip Deloria, Joseph Gone, Jane Hill, Judith Irvine, Webb Keane, William Leap, Bruce Mannheim, and the anonymous reviewer. For their time and effort, I am truly grateful. All errors are my own.

This article is triggered by an analytic puzzle. In about half of a corpus of Korean telephone openings, callers produce a second summons, yeposeyyo, in the second turn of the opening sequence. The analysis unravels the interactional and organizational contingencies involved in the construction of the caller's second summons. It shows that the second summons operates as a vehicle for inviting recognition, and that the answerers overlay their work of recognition onto their talk in the third turn. In this way, the parties confront, work through, and display their underlying orientation to the organizational problem of establishing each other's identity in dealing with the second summons/answer sequence.An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in 2004. I would like to thank John Heritage, Manny Schegloff, and Sung-Ock Sohn for valuable comments on earlier drafts. Barbara Johnstone and two anonymous readers for this journal also gave helpful advice.