This study examines video recordings of activities within an elderly care home, particularly focusing on interactions involving people with dementia. The study presents instances where the relevance of the current conduct—and consequently the generation of a fitting response—appears indeterminate to the co-participant. Despite the uncertainty surrounding the mutually understood ‘constitutive expectancies’ (Garfinkel 1963) and a lack of shared understanding of ‘motivational relevancies’ (Schutz 1970), the participants continue to engage with one another. The analysis reveals that, in the face of an unrecognizable set of conduct and the indeterminacy of subsequent actions before closing down the activity, participants strive to maintain some degree of intersubjectivity by preserving or revisiting the constitutive order of their interaction. This commitment to the ‘co-operative’ nature of human actions (Goodwin 2018) is argued to be central to their interactions. (People with dementia, co-operative actions, conversation analysis, multimodality, ethnomethodology, intersubjectivity)*

This study adopts a raciolinguistic perspective to examine the portrayal and reception of Ruan Yuejiao, a Vietnamese female spouse character created by a Taiwanese male content creator. As a representative of the Taiwanese majority, this content creator utilizes linguistic features to perform a racialized Vietnamese accent and embody a Vietnamese spouse persona, which they believe counters racial stereotypes. This article introduces the concept of indexical hijack to describe how the racial majority imposes new indexical meanings on these mediatized linguistic features, disregarding the perspectives of the Vietnamese community. By highlighting a raciolinguistic listening mode embedded within Taiwan's multicultural discourse, this study reveals how anti-racist actions initiated by the Vietnamese community are reinterpreted by the Taiwanese majority as racist, reflecting the complexities of post-racial multiculturalism in East Asia. (Raciolinguistics, Taiwan, Vietnamese migrants, digital enregisterment, indexicality)*

Through analyzing Telemundo's Betty en NY (‘Betty in New York’, 2019), this study illustrates how insights from codeswitching contribute to sociolinguistic theories of stancetaking and style. Betty en NY features multiple characters that use Spanish-English codeswitching to invoke their epistemic rights, take stances, and craft distinct personae, thereby exploiting the agentive potential of linguistic boundaries. Thus, codeswitching serves as a key resource for signaling recursive recalibration—the process by which the alignment of individual stances connects to the repositioning of participant roles and personae. Drawing on data from multiple scenes, a discourse analysis of recursive recalibration at work demonstrates how stance alignment and personae are dialogically negotiated and constructed in interaction. (Stance, codeswitching, social meaning, epistemic rights, style, media)*

Examining regional variation across African American communities has advanced research on African American English beyond its treatment as a singular, uniform variety. While the earlier focus on inner-city, and often male, youth prioritized studying these speakers’ production of ethnolectal patterns, less attention was paid to other language practices of these speakers and their broader semiotic construction of identity. Drawing on ethnographic data and sociolinguistic interviews from African American speakers from Rochester, New York who identify as Hood Kids, I examine how the bought vowel can become a marker of a particular place-identity in Rochester. I argue that the Hood Kid is an adequation of an enregistered racialized NYC persona that reanalyzes bought while also drawing on other emblems of Black, street culture. Such variation suggests that speakers’ conceptualization of race and place ideologically scales beyond immediately local geographic boundaries. (African American Language, style, race and ethnicity, regional variation)*

Drawing from Erving Goffman's seminal work on face-to-face interaction, this article introduces the concepts of digital face-work and the digital interaction in order to make sense of digital interaction. The theoretical framework emphasizes the sociotechnical aspects of face-work, portraying digital platforms not merely as spaces for interaction but as active participants co-shaping users’ face-work. Focusing on the political arena, the study examines how politicians use digital platforms to construct and maintain their digital face in relation to ‘small scandals’. Through a case study of Flemish nationalist politician, Theo Francken, trying to save face after a scandal erupted, it illustrates the complexities of digital face-work in a hybrid media system. The article underscores the challenges of managing face in the digital landscape, where context collapse and platform directives complicate self-presentation strategies. It also explores the interplay between individual agency and platform dynamics in shaping the digital interaction order. (Digital face, digital interaction order, political scandals, small scandals)

This article focuses on the branding of Patriotic Alternative (PA), a British fascist organization and business, in three analytic steps: (i) branding as circulating ideologies as commodities; (ii) branding as creating—and selling—community, and (iii) branding as regimenting meaning. Building on work on the communicability of evil and language, nationalism, and political economy, we explore how PA uses the affordances of platform capitalism in a project that goes beyond ideological normalization: not just rebranding a message as acceptable but selling a product which builds a community aligned with this ideology. Looking at both brand and political websites, YouTube, as well as Telegram channels, we show how PA's branding functions to invest a wide range of mundane practices with racist meaning; they are imagined to forestall the great replacement. Rebranding racism as white community, every cup of tea sold brings back the world of your grandma, each bar of soap protects white skin. (Far-right semiosis, branding, platform capitalism)*

This article uses a dialogue between memory studies (MS) and ethnographic and interactional sociolinguistics (EIS) to explore the dynamics of interdisciplinarity. MS focuses on the social remembering of high-profile and often traumatic events, and this is relevant to EIS's growing interest in (in)securitization. MS is increasingly keen to explore everyday practices of remembering in interscalar analyses, and EIS’ expertise in the study of mundane communication can provide essential support. But there are major differences in their focal concerns and analytical cultures, as well as in their approaches to interdisciplinarity. This generates asymmetries in their exchange, which we illustrate with studies from Oświęcim/Auschwitz (MS) and Cyprus (EIS). By mapping these differences and highlighting collaborative data sessions as a practical arena for building relationships, the article seeks to deepen our understanding of interdisciplinarity and facilitate its practice. (Everyday practice, cultural memory, (in)securitisation, Mode 1 and Mode 2 interdisciplinarity)

Recently, the Danish island of Bornholm has earned international fame for its food. In this article, we analyze how the meaning and value of the phenomenon of ‘Bornholmian food’ is transmitted and transformed through discursive processes, moving from the island to other locations. Through analysis of photos and audio-recordings from Bornholmian restaurants on Bornholm, in Copenhagen, and in Brooklyn, New York, we focus on recurring elements and noteworthy differences in the presentation of Bornholm, and we discuss how these depend on place and context. Thereby the circulation of ‘Bornholmian food’ is more than transmission of meaning and value; ‘Bornholmian food’ becomes different things in different locations. We suggest that although authenticity is made relevant, authentication is merely a starting point for processes of meaning production, notably when considering the reception of guests. In particular, nostalgia and exoticization make the relation to Bornholm meaningful to both producers and consumers. (Food, authentication, nostalgia, exotization, semiotic landscape analysis)

While scholars have long been interested in the formation, meaning, and uses of diminutive morphology across languages, the present study illustrates a novel approach to their examination. Drawing upon a corpus of recordings of Brazilian obstetric and gynecological consultations conducted in Portuguese, our analytic points of departure are action and the sequential progression of interaction. We address these by investigating moments where diminutive forms and base forms of a lexical item are used in close proximity. This approach allows us to unpack and particularize the generic, overarching function of ‘mitigation’ in terms of the specific actions being constituted by the participants—here, offering reassurance, attenuating intrusiveness, pursuing acquiescence, and launching activity transitions. We conclude by discussing some of the implications of this analysis and suggesting some potential avenues for future comparative research. (Portuguese, Brazil, gynecology, obstetrics, healthcare, morphology, pragmatics, granularity, methodology, conversation analysis)*

Deaf signers are typically multilingual, often exposed to a signed language and a spoken and/or written language. One outcome of this type of contact is ‘mouthing’—the silent articulation of spoken/written words with the simultaneous production of a sign. This article focuses on mouthing patterns in the Kufr Qassem deaf community, in which there is contact between Kufr Qassem Sign Language (KQSL), Israeli Sign Language (ISL), as well as Hebrew, and Arabic, which exists as a diglossia. The findings show that mouthing is constrained by the interlocutor and sign language used, with more mouthing with an ISL interlocutor than KQSL interlocutor, and when using ISL signs than KQSL signs. Contact with a diglossic spoken language shows that signers mouth in Palestinian Arabic rather than in Modern Standard Arabic. Furthermore, evidence of diachronic changes in mouthing was found, reflecting changes in education and mobility. (Mouthing, sign language, language contact, Kufr Qassem Sign Language, Israeli Sign Language, Arabic, diglossia)*

Ridicule is often understood as an instrument used by an agent to accomplish a goal. This article, however, investigates ridicule as an indexical phenomenon, a social meaning activated for certain participants in particular situations. Through a detailed analysis of interviews with a scientist, this study shows how storytelling, stance-taking, and entitlement practices help shape the experience of ridicule and the situations where it occurs. The scientist experiences a joke about her research as ridicule when it is reported in the news but experiences the same joke as rapport when it is told by colleagues in the lab. The article demonstrates that the meanings and purposes of humor do not inhere in jokes, and joking rights do not inhere in people; they are negotiated and accomplished in interaction. Drawing on an indexical understanding of context, it further shows how the experience of situations shapes and is shaped by discourse. (Narrative, stance, entitlement, indexicality, humor, literacy, scientific popularization)*

This article explores relations between transcultural processes and historical boundaries. Drawing on the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of assemblage, it examines the selection and organisation of cultural elements in a Japanese-styled Chinese New Year installation at a Hong Kong shopping mall. The article presents three affective regimes produced in this transcultural assemblage: New Year festivity, simulated tourism, and partial historicity. We argue that these regimes are regulated in the processes of erasure (the selective blockage of competing lineages of rituals, traditions, and spaces) and forgetting (the process evoking creative re-organisation of semiotic boundaries between cultural elements selected into the transcultural assemblage). This article suggests two implications. First, transculturality is not only the dialogic transgression and creation of boundaries but also the selection and regulation of cultural elements in an assemblage. Second, historical boundaries are not sidestepped but are regulated by the partial blockage through erasure and re-organisation through forgetting in affective regimes. (Transculturality, assemblage, affective regime, erasure, forgetting, Hong Kong)

Translingual knowledge allows sociolinguists to appreciate more ‘playful’ negotiation and the assemblages of linguistic, cultural, and semiotic resources for meaning-making. Yet, this very idea of ‘translingual playfulness’ should never lose sight of the subversive purpose of this apparent playfulness: to destabilise norms and boundaries. The reason behind all of this translingual playfulness is precisely the ‘precarious’ positions of the creators of the playful. In this article, I urge sociolinguists to think more carefully about how translingual playfulness may connect to precarity and argue that it is important not to construe playfulness and precarity as dichotomous or even as opposite ends of a spectrum but rather to view them as symbiotically (re)constituting each other. The idea of ‘precarity’, thereby, deserves much more attention than the representation of ‘playfulness’; that is, explicit/implicit translingual precarity needs to be revealed in translingual scholarship. (Translingualism, playfulness, precarity)*

This article examines the online reaction to the linguistic performance of a pro-China Hong Kong singer-actor in a commercial where he speaks Hong Kong English. Paradoxically, the posters criticizing his English are Hongkongers themselves, while those showing admiration are mainland Chinese. Understanding this paradox requires an appreciation of the multiple and complex orders of indexicality through which the variety is evaluated and of the increasing use of linguistic evaluations as a proxy for political judgements in a society undergoing significant changes. An analysis of online comments and remixes associated with the commercial shows that Hong Kong social media users attribute a range of different indexical meanings to the celebrity's English to shame him for his perceived ‘betrayal’ and to reclaim a sense of social superiority over mainlanders in the face of unease about Hongkongers’ cultural distinctiveness. It unpacks complexities surrounding the deployment of language ideologies in societies experiencing sociopolitical upheavals. (Language ideologies, linguistic ridicule, orders of indexicality, polycentricity, social media, Hong Kong)*