Among the Sui people of rural southwestern China, descent-group loyalties are closely tied to linguistic features. In every village, long-term dialect contact occurs between local villagers and in-marrying women from different clans, yet most speakers maintain their original dialect features to a high degree. The present study conducts ethnographic interviews to more deeply understand why such behavior occurs. Most current, practice-based models of identity tend to emphasize dynamic, flexible, individualistic choices – an approach that suits variation on many levels in many societies. However, to understand the descent-group loyalties particular to indigenous, non-Western, clan-based cultures like Sui, a more tempered, culturally sensitive model is necessary. Speakers show a deep sense of stability, permanence, and collective loyalty to communities of descent, (re)produced through stable linguistic expressions: acts of loyalty. The study also highlights the use of indigenous minorities’ own categories (place, toponyms, lineage) rather than non-indigenous categories. (Language and identity, place, dialect contact, clan, indigenous minority, acts of identity, acts of loyalty, community of practice, community of descent)

This study illustrates how body-part vocabulary can contribute to linguistic gender construction. As a starting point, gendering mechanisms pertinent to body-part terms are delineated. On a theoretical plane, the study is indebted to poststructuralism and the notion of performativity in identity construction. Gender performativity via body-part vocabulary is explored by quantitatively and qualitatively analyzing material from a corpus of 2,000 advertisements from the two magazines, Cosmopolitan and Men’s Health, yielding evidence on how two specific commercial versions of femininity and masculinity are discursively constructed. The findings are highly stereotypical and therefore bear witness to body-part lexemes as traces of dominant gender discourses whose gender indexicality can be strategically exploited. The concluding discussion advances a theorization of linguistic identity construction in line with performativity, which departs from more traditional variationist approaches that see identity as a pre-discursive fact. (Language and gender, body, advertising discourse, body-part vocabulary, poststructuralism, performativity)

Recent scholarship on the working of racial formation processes underscores the intersection between discursive and structural components in the emergence of “race,” and the agency of individuals at the local and global level in articulating its meaning. This article offers a link toward understanding how racial formation processes operate in face-to-face interaction, by highlighting how people do racialization. Based on fieldwork in Italy, it explores how conversationalists deploy agreement to co-construct a racialized image of immigrants to Italy. It is argued that this deployment leads to reinforcement of the racist stances expressed in the conversation itself, and possibly beyond it. In addition, the repeated occurrence of agreement during the co-construction of utterances produces a spiral effect around racializing discourse, a progressive deepening of the racialization itself. At the same time, agreement leads to a decrease of personal responsibility for the statements made, which come to be co-constructed among conversationalists. (Agreement, racialization, immigration, Italy)

As Coupland and others show, Bauman’s account of “performance” provides a valuable perspective on speech stylization across a range of public contexts. This article explores the limitations of performance as a window on crossing and stylization in everyday practice, and although recognizing other frames as well, it dwells on Goffman’s interaction ritual, cross-referring to two studies of adolescents in England. In the first, race and ethnicity were controversial, and the performance of other-ethnic styles was risky. But interaction ritual constructed crossing and stylization as urgent responses to the exigencies of the moment, and this made them more acceptable. In the second, performance implies a reflexive composure that is hard to reconcile with informants’ experience of social class as an uncomfortable but only half-articulated issue, whereas interaction ritual provides a sharp lens on how youngsters used stylized “posh” and Cockney varieties to register their apprehension of ongoing stratification. (Interaction ritual, stylization, crossing, performance)1

This article examines local and global language ideologies surrounding a particular phonetic feature in Indian English, the pronunciation of /v/ as [w]. By focusing on how local and global participants – both individuals and institutions – imagine language variation through disparate framings of “neutral” and “standard,” it highlights how processes of globalization and localization are interconnected, dialogic, and symbiotic. Compared are (i) sociolinguistic constructions of Indian cartoon characters, (ii) American “accent training” institutes, (iii) Indian call center and language improvement books, (iv) American speakers’ interpretations of merged IE speech, and, (v) IE speakers’ attitudes about IE, “neutral,” and ”standard” language. The relative social capital of these populations mediates both how each constructs its respective ideology about language variation, and how these ideologies dialogically interact with each other. (Language variation, language ideologies, dialogic, standard language)1

This study explores how agency emerges and is negotiated moment by moment in interaction by applying Erving Goffman’s notion of production format to an extended sequence of discourse that revolves around accomplishing a conjoint action: the rewriting of an official letter. Deconstructing the participants into the social roles they undertake in accomplishing this task illustrates what is involved in exercising agency: interactively negotiating production format roles and footing shifts through several linguistic strategies aimed at either claiming, ratifying, or rejecting the participants’ agency. These include providing options, negotiating production format roles, asking questions, speaking for another, questioning and asserting expertise, providing counter-arguments, and asserting past agentive selves. This study, thus, contributes to an understanding of agency as co-constructed, mediated, and continually negotiated, while also identifying specific linguistic strategies through which agency is negotiated in interaction. (Agency, disability, production format, social actor, conjoint action, linguistic strategies)*

Recent research on narrative has widened the scope of analysis, suggesting the value of reexamining the canonical Labovian view of the structure and function of personal-experience narrative. This article suggests that narrative is not simply a way of evoking and shaping experience in time. Rather, narrative can evoke and shape cultural “chronotopes” (Bakhtin 1981) or nexuses of time, space, and identity. To illustrate this, I analyze a narrative from an oral history related in 1972 by a young woman whose volunteer work in the mid-1960s led to the rehabilitation of a small African American enclave in a middle-class White suburb. Analysis of clause types, constructed dialogue, existential there, deixis, verb chains, and referring expressions shows that the narrative is a blend of genres evoking place as well as personal identity linked to complex coordinates of time and space, and dependent intertextually on other parts of a larger story. (Narrative, oral history, chronotope, space, place, identity, genre)*

This article considers language use in Tanzanian beauty pageants, where contestants’ onstage speech is the focus of explicit and implicit critique. In particular, contestants who speak English are far more likely to win than are their Swahili-speaking counterparts. But because English has limited circulation and is restricted to the educated elite, speaking English is, for most contestants, possible only through memorization. Local ideologies that give preference to purity over standardness mean that, while contestants’ speeches are often full of grammatical oddities, their linguistic posturing is typically well received. Yet once a contestant reaches the pinnacle of competition, expectations for language use rise, and once-successful contestants find themselves at a glass ceiling. Findings presented here point to the local and hierarchical nature of language ideologies, and to the need to account for the common practice in multilingual communities of successfully employing “incomplete” linguistic knowledge for indexical and referential effect. (Language ideology, multilingualism, Swahili, English, language purity, beauty pageants, education)*

This article analyzes a set of anti-immigrant jokes with which Jay Leno entertained his national television audience in 2006, when the U.S. public was focused on unprecedented demonstrations urging justice for immigrants. Leno adroitly mocks immigrants and their cause to give his audience emotional release by distancing them from immigrants. It is argued that political comedy can be an insidious discursive practice that reduces its audience’s critical judgment as it signifies social boundaries. It should be carefully scrutinized because, with a few laughs, Leno can steer sentiment about public policy and instantiate divisiveness for an audience of 6 million who, in the words of Leno’s official website, “are drifting off to dreamland.” (Humor, political comedy, late-night television, immigrant rights marches)*

Despite a growing literature on the production and reproduction of linguistic inequality in mass media, we know little about how individuals experience such sociolinguistic marginalization. To fill this gap, this study examines a monolingual Taiwanese elderly woman’s experiences of television viewing. In the context of language shift in Taiwan after 40 years of Mandarin-only policy, language hierarchy persists despite the current policy of multilingualism. Although the subject does not understand the referential meaning of most shows because of language barriers, she recognizes socially indexical meanings about the ranking of languages and how she is positioned and excluded. The unequal participant structure in the dynamic interactions between two overlapping communicative events of television viewing and family discussions of the shows doubly marginalizes her. This study demonstrates how the choice of linguistic code in television programming conveys meaning and structures participation frameworks that engage minority monolingual individuals in dialogic processes of identity construction. (Sociolinguistic marginalization, participation framework, Bakhtin, identity, Taiwan, television)*

This article discusses stylistic and contextual variations in the political oratory (kabary politika) of urban Madagascar. New imported oratorical styles and older styles of kabary represent competing linguistic markets where political leaders field broader issues of political modernity, fighting government corruption through reforms toward transparency. Kabary has become the object of criticism in models for transparent government practice. This has affected the way leaders speak to and about the country, reifying a moral structure arguing what constitutes truth and how speakers understand language as conveying that truth. In this respect, this article describes linguistic and metalinguistic encodings of transparency versus corruption in the political communication styles of highland Malagasy political orators. It looks at how the rhetorical modes of an urban polity are reorganized in ways that reshape vernacular epistemologies of truth in language and shift the production of particular publics and their access to participation in political process. (Madagascar, kabary, oratory, democracy, linguistic variation, language ideology, truth and ethics, public opinion, public culture)*

This article illustrates how the notions of style and indexicality can illuminate understanding of the social meaning of a specific linguistic variable, the tag question. Drawing on conversational speech and ethnographic data from a community of high school girls in northwest England, it quantitatively and qualitatively examines the discourse, grammatical, and phonological design of tag questions in this community. Members of four social groups are shown to use tag questions to similar effect, as a means of conducing particular points of view. However, these groups also exhibit striking differences in the stylistic composition of tags, distinctions that indexically construct stances and personas, which may in turn come to represent group identity. These data suggest that the social meaning of tag questions can be best ascertained by examining their internal composition and by situating them in their broader discursive and social stylistic contexts. (Adolescents, ethnography, indexicality, interactional context, quantitative discourse analysis, social meaning, style, tag questions)

This article addresses data that reside at the confluence of three types of linguistic “crossing” (Rampton 1995) among working-class French teens of predominantly Algerian descent. Strategically using the microphone of the researcher to imitate an elite French television show host, performers create indirect reported speech and direct stylized voicing for present peers and thereby mock them as show “guests.” Through analysis of such data, this article contributes to scholarship that extends and refines Goffman’s notions of footing and participation frameworks, and the relationships imaginable between them. It is argued that the notions of noncongruent voicing effects and generalized footing can lead to a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between language crossing and participation frameworks. More specifically, analyzing language crossing in terms of the resultant voicing effects sheds light upon the nuanced ways that speakers manage participation frameworks. (Register, crossing, footing, participation frameworks, voicing)

Children’s humorous play is a cultural activity with its own particular aesthetic – an aesthetic in which highly creative, incongruent, and unexpected speech and action are valorized, appreciated, and rewarded. Drawing on Bauman’s concept of calibration, the adjustments by which speakers align their intertextual utterances to new contexts and purposes, this paper argues that an aesthetic of decalibration is at work in children’s metalinguistic and metapragmatic language play. Children capitalize upon linguistic and pragmatic ambiguity to breach expectations, drawing on complex linguistic, contextual and pragmatic knowledge to create maximally humorous language play performances. Through close analysis of videotaped interactions from a larger ethnographic, discourse analytic study of northern Thai children’s everyday lives, this article examines how younger children are socialized into these practices of language play through peripheral participation in multi-age play groups, showing that the repetitive poetic structure and predictability of the play genres constitute jumping-off and breaking-in points for language play. (Calibration, repetition, children’s language, play, language socialization, Thai, humor)1

This article examines the linguistic ideological work entailed in the analyses of Irish by the “revolutionary scholar” and cofounder of the Gaelic League, Eoin MacNeill. It does so to discern one central way in which the essentialized link between the Irish language and a unified Irish people became an efficacious political construction during the armed struggle for independence in the early 20th century. It shows how MacNeill used authoritative linguistic science to engender nationalist sentiment around Irish through semiotic processes even as he challenged a dominant conception of language prevalent in European nationalist movements and social thought. The essay argues that MacNeill wrote against the unilateral valorization of codified linguistic homogeneity and embraced the heterogeneous variation of spoken discourse even as he sought to consolidate Irish national identity through sameness claims. This critical examination suggests that scholars of nationalism reconsider the taken-for-granted homogenizing efforts of nationalist endeavors that are ubiquitously presumed to negatively sanction linguistic variation. (Nationalism, linguistic ideology, Ireland, semiotics, heterogeneity, Eoin MacNeill, Gaelic League, Europe, scientific knowledge)

Scholars have long noted that the imagination of a national public hinges on ideologies of standard language. This study uses ethnographic and media data from Catalonia to reflect on this relationship, focusing on language professionals, the stewards of Catalan’s standard register. The ideological portrait of Catalonia that emerges is one of a national public that is precarious because a standard register of the Catalan language is taken to be the whole language. It is argued that the imagined failings of a Catalan national public suggest conditions for the successful imagining of a national public more generally. In particular, the projection of a taken-for-granted national public appears to depend on a language imagined as standard and homogeneous when contrasted with other national languages but as internally variable when examined within the national context. At one taxonomic level, registers are erased in order for one register imagined as standard and homogeneous to count as the named language in contrast with other named national languages. At a lower recursive level, these registers must be imagined to exist in order for the language and its corresponding national public to be able to account for “everyone” in the projected national public. When these conditions are not met, as in the case of Catalonia, the national public is imagined as fragile. (Language ideology, standardization, publics, enregisterment)*

This article relates the language ideologies of Pakistan in general, and its call centers in particular, with the language policies and practices of the latter. The specific policy focused upon is the commodification of English with a near-native (American or British) accent as linguistic capital. These accents are indexed to the desired foreign identities which the workers of call centers perform in telephonic interaction with clients as part of their sales strategy. This crossing over to native-speaker linguistic identities is not always successful. When successful, however, some workers in the call centers pass as native speakers in certain contexts and for certain purposes. Such practices and the policies upon which they are contingent are consequences of language ideologies that entail language discrimination against the workers of the call centers by the Pakistani English-using elite, and vice versa. (English, commodification of language, accent, linguistic capital, language policy, identity, passing, crossing, call centers, Pakistan)

While information sources have largely been treated as transparent categories in the literature on evidentiality, understandings of information source can be culturally and situationally variable. This article proposes that the strictly linguistic information encoded in reportative evidentials cannot be cleanly separated from social influences. Defining an information source, especially when referring to information reported by another person, serves social purposes, such as casting doubt, framing gossip, distancing oneself, or indicating empathy. Using the concept of speaker stance, this study explores the relationship of information source to the interpersonal relationships and interactions that are encoded in this linguistic form. Data from a contact variety of Spanish spoken in central Bolivia provide evidence that diz(que), a Spanish word, has undergone influence from Quechua to become a systematic reportative evidential marker in this variety of Bolivian Spanish. Speakers use information source marking in order to shade subtleties of relationships and authority. (Evidentiality, speaker stance, Andean Spanish, Bolivian Spanish, language contact, linguistic anthropology)*