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‘Deaf people are one, as they say’: Articulating ‘deaf space’ and deaf-hearing communication in a Ugandan market Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-09-20 Julia Modern
This article investigates visual communication practices among members of a disabled people's organisation (DPO) in a market in Uganda. Deaf members and many of the hearing members are proficient in Ugandan Sign Language (UgSL) and use it daily. I examine three communicative settings within the market, identifying varied modes of visual communication in use, ranging from loosely conventionalised multimodal
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Constraints, suffering, and surfacing repertoires among Gambian migrants in Italy Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-09-12 Marco Santello
This article explores one underestimated aspect of language in migration settings, namely the experience of not being in full control of circumstances and doing. Recent research has indeed highlighted aspects such as transcendence of boundaries, hinting at a version of multilingualism among migrants that does not feature enough of their experience of constraints. In contrast, other scholars have emphasised
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(Im)precise personae: The effect of socio-indexical information on semantic interpretation Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-05-20 Andrea Beltrama, Florian Schwarz
In this article, we address the following question: how do comprehenders reason about the persona embodied by the speaker to determine the referential meaning of numerical expressions such as ‘The price is $200’? Using a picture selection task, we show that descriptions uttered by speakers embodying a Nerdy persona, indexically associated with highly precise speech, are interpreted more precisely than
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Doing being an average teenager: Deploying ordinariness as subversive disability performance in presentational media Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-05-06 Xiaowei May Li
Scholars have shown how speakers are inclined to discursively position themselves as ‘ordinary’ in order to claim and benefit from membership in a socially unmarked category, and that the effect of ‘being ordinary’ is an effortful communicative achievement (e.g. Sacks 1984). This study re-examines and extends such insight by focusing on socially marked individuals—people with disabilities—and considers
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The liminal (vowel) space of womanhood: Fundamental frequency, formants, and the intersex body in Brazil Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-05-03 Ashlee Dauphinais Civitello
Despite the significance of intersex constituencies for explaining the social nature of sex and gender, intersex linguistic and social practices remain a yet unexplored frontier within sociolinguistics. This article examines fundamental frequency (F0) and vowel formant (F1–F3) production by participants with Turner Syndrome (TS), one of the most common intersex chromosomal conditions, in Rio de Janeiro
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Settle for Biden: The scalar production of a normative presidential candidate on Instagram Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-04-30 Katherine Arnold-Murray
This article performs a multimodal digital discourse analysis to examine how the 2020 social media political campaign called ‘Settle for Biden’ successfully encouraged young Progressives to vote for Joe Biden. In contrast to previous US presidential campaigns that highlight the extraordinary capabilities of their candidates, this campaign utilized the scalar and chronotopic production of normativity
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Why language revitalization fails: Revivalist vs. traditional ontologies of language in Provence Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-04-02 James Costa
This article asks why the Occitan language revitalization movement, which began in the 1850s, failed to convince the vast majority of Occitan speakers. Traditional explanations focus on social conflict, alienation, and diglossic ideologies. While essential elements, they may not provide a full account. Challenging the idea that patois is just a derogatory term pinned on what is in fact a language,
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Who's being elitist? A debate about the enregisterment of Singlish Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Luke Lu
This article is a rejoinder to Lee (2023) who makes certain claims about the enregisterment of Singlish via a case study of Spiaking Singlish. In challenging Lee's key claim that Spiaking Singlish deploys a form of elitist language, I argue that the Singlish features in the book need not demand a solely ludic reading and actually draw from everyday practices. Accordingly, enregisterment ought to be
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Alternative spaces of encounter: Characterological metadiscourses and ‘joint voice’ in Finnish multi-ethnic inclusive theater Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Tomi Visakko
This article explores the characterological metadiscourses through which characters, or figures of personhood, become modeled, evaluated, and enacted during a multi-ethnic, community-inclusive theater project that aims to make the group's ‘joint voice’ heard on stage and in society. Based on ethnographic data and discourse-analytical methods, the article examines two modes of characterological metadiscourse
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Discursive scaling of solidarity through difference: Experiences of African women in the African diaspora Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-02-16 Gorrety Nafula Wawire
Drawing on data generated from a two-year ethnographic observation with a group of multiethnic Black women, this investigation delves into the ways they employ discursive and linguistic strategies, namely solidarity through difference and distinction, solidarity through denaturalizing difference, and solidarity through shared struggles and learning in deictically anchored interactions. The study presents
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‘Whitefellas got miserable language skills’: Differentiation, scripted speech, and Indigenous discourses Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-01-25 Monika Bednarek, Barbara A. Meek
Linguistic differences in staged or scripted performances matter, since language, or language-ing, is a critical component in structuring power and maintaining unequal social differences or challenging and complicating them. To investigate such scripted speech in the context of Indigenous characters, we draw on the semiotic processes of erasure and rhematisation as well as the newly proposed concepts
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Trajectories of spirituality: Producing and assessing cultural evidence at the International Criminal Court Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Sigurd D'hondt, Juan-Pablo Pérez-León-Acevedo, Fabio Ferraz de Almeida, Elena Barrett
In this article, we examine the production and assessment of evidence about spirit beliefs in the international criminal trial of Ugandan rebel commander Dominic Ongwen, submitted by the defense to show that their client committed the crimes he is accused of under duress. This duress defense was ultimately rejected by the ICC Judges, based on a binary understanding of ‘believing’ that depicts Ongwen
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“She did it!”: Meaning-making in interaction between deaf and hearing siblings in Peru Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2024-01-04 Sara A. Goico
In this article, I argue that centering multimodal practices is important in the study of human communication and sociality, and becomes particularly relevant in the presence of asymmetries in language access. Using data collected as part of a two-year linguistic ethnography of deaf youth in Iquitos, Peru, I demonstrate how three siblings engage in extended dispute routines even in the face of sensory
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Positioning of applicants in asylum interviews: Case officers as recontextualising agents Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-12-20 Hanna Sofia Rehnberg
This study aims to develop an understanding of how different communicative strategies used by case officers in asylum interviews may position applicants in various ways. The analysis focuses on a relatively standardised sequence at the start of asylum interviews, where the communicative situation and its legal framework are explained to the applicant. Case officers use guidelines to support them with
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‘One is allowed to show the reality’: The creation of panoptic structures in social media communication Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-12-07 Janus Spindler Møller
This article aims to introduce the notion of panoptic structures as a way of theorizing how people strategically exploit the affordances of digital devices to expose other people's behavior. I argue that Foucault's notion of panopticism becomes relevant in new ways in social life as a consequence of the polymedia repertoires of networked individuals. Central here is the ability to store digital communication
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Plays with words: Fungible(ly) fugitive Black sound in ethnographies of communication Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Justin Lance Pannell
Anti-Black language ideologies manifest in exclusionary language policies (e.g. Sung & Allen-Handy 2019), educational tracking (e.g. Sung 2018), and scholarly claims of Black ‘deficiency’ (Smitherman 2000). A liberal educational research tradition has countered with ethnographic accounts of cultural ‘mismatch’ (Michaels 2006) vis-à-vis Black educational ‘failure’. Conducting a textual analysis of an
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Sumud pedagogy as linguistic citizenship: Palestinian youth in Israel against imposed subjectivities Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-10-27 Muzna Awayed-Bishara
This linguistic ethnographic study offers a nuanced pedagogical account of the Arabic term sumud, or ‘steadfastness’, through a sociolinguistic analysis of decolonial modes of expression among Palestinian youth in Israel. I reflect on events during the 2021 uprisings in East Jerusalem, when Palestinian youth within Israel took to the streets in solidarity with Palestinians in Jerusalem and Gaza. Considering
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Evaluative reactions to minority languages and their varieties: Evidence from new speakers of West Frisian Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Ruth Kircher, Ethan Kutlu, Mirjam Vellinga
Little is known about the connection between individuals’ evaluative reactions to (i) minority languages as such, and (ii) specific varieties of these minority languages. This study investigates such evaluative reactions amongst new speakers of Frisian in the Netherlands (n = 264). A questionnaire was used to elicit participants’ attitudes towards the Frisian language and their evaluations of the specific
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HOLLYWOOD: The political economy and global citation of an emblematic language object Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-09-20 Sean P. Smith, Johan Järlehed, Adam Jaworski
The HOLLYWOOD sign is arguably the world's most famous language object. Emblematic of prestige and cultural capital, the sign can be found not just in Los Angeles, but in citations all over the world. Beginning with the history of its valorization, HOLLYWOOD is shown to emanate symbolic value through a set of enregistered semiotic features. Drawing upon a set of globally sourced citations of HOLLYWOOD
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Investment and the inaudible mother tongue: Carving out a space for Kurdish in the soundscape of an Istanbul kebab restaurant Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-09-08 Anne Ambler Schluter
Firmly grounded in local sociopolitical constraints, language policies at Istanbul's Kurdish-run eating establishments often place Kurdish employees’ cultural identity construction at odds with their workplaces’ economic viability. In the face of rigid structures that cement the dominance of Turkish, the Kurdish managers highlighted in a previous study exercise limited agency to enact language policies
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#HoldTight: Neoliberal affects, embodied hopes, and anticipatory chronotopes in corporate LGBTQ diversity discourse Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-08-17 Joseph Comer
Across the contemporary world, neoliberalism operates as an anticipatory regime through which mediatised conceptions of the future are aligned to an aggressive (absolute) marketisation of social life. Alongside a critical, queer-theoretical attention to homonormativity, this article uses multimodal critical discourse studies techniques to analyse how such a neoliberal future for LGBTQ people is envisioned
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Understanding the role of transcription in evidential consistency of police interview records in England and Wales Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-08-15 Emma Richardson, Magnus Hamann, James Tompkinson, Kate Haworth, Felicity Deamer
Evidential records of investigative interviews serve an important institutional purpose within the legal system in England and Wales. Academic scholars have long recognized that little institutional attention is paid to the transformation process that occurs when written records of the spoken are produced, nor to the potential impact this has on later interpretation by users of the records during the
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Presenting a united front at the dinner table: The case of merged speakership and merged recipiency Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-07-31 Hansun Zhang Waring
The importance of presenting a united front has long since been an integral part of parenting advice. Despite the wealth of productive research on parent-child interaction, we have very little knowledge of how such a united front is assembled in situ, In the meantime, although few would question the benefit of collaboration, we are still in the process of understanding how collaboration is carried
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Tactile engagement of prospective next speakers in Indonesian multiparty conversations Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-07-17 Joe Blythe, Fakry Hamdani, Scott Barnes
This article investigates the use of touch as a tool for engaging prospective next speakers within Indonesian multiparty conversation. We examine the lamination of touch onto questions directed towards specifically targeted recipients. First, we find that questions with touch are deployed when the physical environment complicates the attainment of mutual orientation. Second, when previously targeted
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Grassroots scaling up: Navigating algorithmic scales in a technopolitical landscape Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-06-16 Lauren Zentz
My theoretical aim in this article is to focus on an examination of processual enactments of scale in light of the technological affordances that are currently at the disposal of a significant majority of humans. I offer the terms algorithmic scales and algorithmic scalar affordances to describe one activist's engagement of practical theories of scale—her ‘algorithmic imagination’ (Bucher 2017)—which
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Aspirational identities and desire through discourses of productivity in marginal individuals: A case study of three women Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-06-16 Roberta Piazza
This article investigates how marginal individuals construct a productive self in an interview. It reports on a case study of three women—a squatter, a rough sleeper, and an Irish Traveller—who inhabit uncertain and threatened homes. In response to dominant discourses of productivity, in the interviews the speakers’ talk reflects the desire to be perceived as able and knowledgeable individuals. Thus
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Practicing ground rules in police interviews with child witnesses Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-05-30 Guusje Jol, Wyke Stommel
In police interviews with child witnesses, ground rules like ‘correct me when I say something wrong’ are established. Establishing these ground rules is required by guidelines, with the aim of enhancing the reliability of children's testimonies. In this article, we use conversation analysis to examine how ground rules are practiced in thirty-eight Dutch police interviews with child witnesses. We focus
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The role of social affiliation in incitement: A social semiotic approach to far-right terrorists’ incitement to violence Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Awni Etaywe, Michele Zappavigna
One key aspect of threat in terrorists’ language is incitement to violence. Contributing to a fuller understanding of how terrorists use language to encourage people to join their cause, this article examines the role of evaluative language in incitement strategies used by a far-rightist to align with and alienate particular social groups. The Affiliation framework (Knight 2010a; Zappavigna 2011; Etaywe
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Shouting absences: Disentangling the ghosts of Ukraine in occupied Crimea Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-05-11 Natalia Volvach
This article aims to illuminate absences in the semiotic landscape of Crimea, resulting from the erasure of Ukraine after Russia's occupation of Crimea in 2014. By foregrounding what is not there, the study expands semiotic landscapes studies and critical sociolinguistic research more generally by interrogating absence and its haunting effects. More than 3,500 photographs of semiotic landscapes collected
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Homescapes of im~mobility: Migratory transpatial repertoires during the pandemic Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-05-04 Roula Kitsiou, Stella Bratimou
The present article reflects on the concept of ‘spatial repertoire’ through a ‘trans’-perspective in order to explain the trans-formation of migrants’ homescapes during the pandemic—a time of restricted mobility. In the context of translocal im~mobility, this ethnographically informed multiple case study explores how three Greek ‘brain drain’ immigrants performed homescapes in the online-offline nexus
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Pop Song English as a supralocal norm Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-04-11 Andy Gibson
An American-influenced singing accent, referred to here as Pop Song English (PSE), is common in popular music throughout (and beyond) the Anglophone world. This article presents an analysis of the sung pronunciation of two variables (bath and nonprevocalic /r/) that distinguish New Zealand English (NZE) from American Englishes (AmE). The Phonetics of Popular Song (PoPS) corpus includes 154 performers
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The recontextualisation of Multicultural London English: Stylising the ‘roadman’ Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-04-11 Christian Ilbury
Though research on the multiethnolect spoken in London—Multicultural London English (MLE)—has described the social distribution of the variety, the stylistic potentials of MLE remain poorly understood. This article explores the enregisterment and subsequent ‘recontextualisation’ (Bauman & Briggs 1990) of MLE by analysing the linguistic and aesthetic components of a stylistic identity—the ‘roadman’
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Producing the disciplined English-speaking subjects: Language policing, development ideology, and English medium of instruction policy Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-03-09 Prem Phyak
This article analyzes how English medium of instruction (EMI) policy is implemented by disciplining teachers’ and students’ language behaviors in school spaces. I adopt Foucault's (1977) ‘discipline’ to examine how schools exercise disciplinary power to create an English-only environment in multilingual classroom contexts. The data is drawn from an ethnographic study of EMI policies in two Nepali schools
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Commemorative city-texts: Spatio-temporal patterns in street names in Leipzig, East Germany and Poznań, Poland Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-03-08 Isabelle Buchstaller, Małgorzata Fabiszak, Seraphim Alvanides, Anna Weronika Brzezińska, Patryk Dobkiewicz
This article contributes to research on commemorative naming strategies by presenting a comparative longitudinal study on changes in the urban toponymy of Leipzig (Germany) and Poznań (Poland) over a period of 102 years. Our analysis combines memory studies, linguistic landscape (LL) research and critical toponymy with GIS visualization techniques to explore (turnovers in) naming practices across time
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(Trans)languaging, power, and resistance: Bordering as discursive agency Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-03-08 Kristof Savski
The multi/translingual turn in sociolinguistics has highlighted a number of ideological entanglements of foundational concepts, most significantly the way that the notion of ‘named languages’ as bordered entities is intertwined with ideologies of nation and race. In this article, I consider what the conceptual place for linguistic borders is within a ‘trans’ framework of language and propose a focus
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Preference organization and possible -isms in institutional interaction: The case of adult second language classrooms Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-02-16 Nadja Tadic
This study examines preference organization in adult second language classrooms in relation to possible -isms—utterances which are hearably racist, classist, (hetero)sexist, or otherwise exclusionary, although their exclusionary nature may be (re)negotiated in situ. A collection of sixty-one possible -isms from a corpus of fifty-five hours of video-recorded English second language classes was examined
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Hearing the quiet voices: Listening as democratic action in a Norwegian neighborhood Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-01-31 Janet E. Connor
This article explores how modes of listening and ideologies of democratic action are intertwined, through the example of a multicultural neighborhood in Oslo, Norway. While much work on language and democracy focuses on speakers, this article instead interrogates how a government listens to citizens, and how different conceptualizations of what listening is index different understandings of democratic
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Navigating the pitfalls of language standardisation: The imperfect binary of authenticity and anonymity in Creole-speaking Martinique Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-01-31 Chiara Ardoino
Standardisation is often touted as the default means to improve attitudes towards minoritised languages and prevent/reverse their obsolescence. However, standardisation can ‘tamper’ with the indexicalities of minoritised languages, potentially alienating their speakers. Two aspects of standardisation stand out as particularly problematic: the shift from ‘ideologies of authenticity’ to ‘ideologies of
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Local features, local meanings: Language ideologies and place-linked vocalic variation among Jewish Chicagoans Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2023-01-11 Jaime Benheim, Annette D'Onofrio
Research on Jewish English in the United States has drawn on a set of ideologies linking the Jewish ethnolinguistic repertoire to New York City English, but less is known about how these ideologies interface with the social meanings of regional features in the communities outside New York in which these speakers live. Through meta-linguistic commentary and acoustic analyses drawn from sociolinguistic
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Marking and unmarking the (non)native speaker through English language proficiency requirements for university admission Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-12-22 Ingrid Piller, Agnes Bodis
This article examines the language ideologies undergirding university English language admission requirements. Universities are today caught between the order of the nation state and that of corporate globalization as they seek to attract both national and international students. This tension produces conflicting processes of (converse) racialization and linguistic (un)marking within which universities
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‘Living memories of the changing same’: Rio's linguistic landscape at the crossroads of time and race Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-12-06 Rodrigo Borba, Branca Falabella Fabrício, Fátima Lima
This article questions the time of white modernity based on historical periodization and sequential progression, arguing for a more multifaceted approach to time and space in linguistic landscapes (LL). It rethinks the concept of chronotope by examining effects of the African diaspora in Brazil. The experience of radical uprooting it promoted fuses spatiotemporal dimensions that operate in complementary
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The discursive chronotopes of waste: Temporal laminations and linguistic hauntings Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-12-06 Crispin Thurlow, Alessandro Pellanda, Laura Wohlgemuth
This article presents two case-study examples of the discursive chronotopes by which domestic waste is organized as a linguistic, spatial, and temporal configuration. Marked by their liminality and temporal laminations, curbside garbage collection and secondhand/thrift shops are major sociomaterial practices in Switzerland. The three discursive chronotopes we address in these contexts are those concerned
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Mapping the itineraries of semiotic artefacts in the linguistic landscape of protest: The case of shields in Venezuela Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-11-21 Jessica Velásquez Urribarrí
This study explores the emergence and developments through time of a semiotic artefact, the shield, used by demonstrators in violent anti-government protests in contemporary Venezuela. Drawing on the concept of discourse itineraries (Scollon 2008), the material and semiotic transformations this artefact underwent are mapped through various protest cycles, whilst considering the semiotic enrichment
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Preventing the political manipulation of Covid-19 statistics: The importance of going beyond diplomatic language Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-11-21 Michael Billig, Cristina Marinho
This article examines how the political manipulation of Covid-19 statistics was opposed in 2020. It does this by studying in detail the language used in a public exchange of letters in the UK. The exchange was between the chair of the United Kingdom Statistics Authority (UKSA), a statutory body to prevent statistical malpractice, and the Minister of Health, who had been manipulating Covid statistics
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Semiotic timescapes Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-11-21 Michelle M. Lazar
In linguistic/semiotic landscape (LSL) studies, overall, time and temporalities have occupied a curious space between visibility and invisibility, resulting in time and temporalities being treated as an optional, additive, subordinate, or separate dimension in the linguistic and semiotic study of place-making. The term semiotic timescape serves as a heuristic concept which endeavours to centre time
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Colonial labels and the imagined innocence of past times: Debating language and spatial representations of the Danish/Greenlandic relation Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-11-10 Marie Maegaard, Kristine Køhler Mortensen
This article examines struggles related to the recasting of the collective memory connected to Danish colonialism, through analyses of exhibitions in, and communication from, the Danish National Museum. By use of multimodal and semiotic landscape analysis, we show how the Danish National Museum works to reformulate the historical relationship between Greenland and Denmark in ways that avoid the colonizer's
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Translation as discrimination: Sociolinguistics and inequality in multilingual institutional contexts Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-09-12 Philipp Sebastian Angermeyer
Sociolinguistic approaches to social justice tend to treat the use of interpreters or translators as a remedy to linguistic inequality in multilingual institutional settings. This article challenges this assumption by showing how translation can instead contribute to inequality and discrimination. Drawing on studies of face-to-face interpreting in judicial contexts and of written translation in linguistic
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‘You probably have a parasite’: Neoliberal risk and the discursive construction of the body in the wellness industry Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-09-06 Maeve Eberhardt
In this article, I ask how the body is discursively constructed within the wellness industry. I analyze a corpus of articles from the Goop franchise, examining how bodies are constructed, and how subjects are impelled to act within contemporary neoliberal risk culture. Corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis reveals that the body is ultimately constructed as unwell and at risk, by virtue of its
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‘I'm a boy, can't you see that?’: Dialogic embodiment and the construction of agency in trans youth discourse Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-09-05 Lucy Jones
This article offers discourse analysis of young transgender people's interaction, in which they describe being rendered powerless through misgendering or misrepresentation. It argues that the young people's collective responses to these moments enable them to challenge the ideologies underpinning their marginalisation, and to recontextualise the language used by others to describe their bodies. Stance-taking
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Name(ing) norms: Mispronunciations and ethnic categories in political talk Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-09-05 Hanna Svensson
This article investigates the situated orientation to and production of social and political norms related to the pronunciation of person names in the context of announcing next speakers during a political meeting. Through a detailed multimodal analysis of naturally occurring interaction, the article discusses how participants to a political party's congress in Sweden treat the chairpersons’ pronunciation
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‘We get that’: Narrative indexicality and the construction of frustration in police stories about domestic violence victim/survivors Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-09-05 Jennifer Andrus, Nicole Clawson
This article considers a particular set of cultural and ideological discourses—police discourse about domestic violence (DV) victim/survivors—in a study about indexicality. Via the processes of indexicality, victim/survivors are consistently described and constructed as frustrations for police officers and police work. We pinpoint two sociosemantic structures that index frustration—the use of the word
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Labour mobility across the Baltic Sea: Language brokering at a blue-collar workplace in Sweden Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-08-15 Hedda Söderlundh, Leelo Keevallik
In this case study we investigate the role of transnational networks and language brokering in labour migration within the European Union. By describing the working days of Estonians hired by a city maintenance company in Sweden, we demonstrate how language skills and network ties of a manager enable work migration in the local context. Most of the recruited workers belong to the manager's circle of
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Context, precision, and social perception: A sociopragmatic study Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-07-07 Andrea Beltrama, Stephanie Solt, Heather Burnett
In two perception experiments we explore the social indexicality of numerical expressions, comparing the evaluation of three variants: precise (e.g. ‘forty-nine minutes’) vs. explicitly approximate (e.g. ‘about fifty minutes’) vs. underspecified (e.g. ‘fifty minutes’). We ask two questions: (i) What constellations of social meanings are associated with each of these variants? (ii) How are such indexical
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English at the center of the periphery: ‘Chicken nuggets’, chronotopes, and scaling English in Bahraini youth Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-07-01 Wafa Al-Alawi
With the spread of English in Bahrain, ‘chicken nugget’ emerged as a term aimed at English-dominant, typically private-school-educated youth. Drawing on data from Bahraini youth, I show how participants orient to different timespaces as they negotiate their identities relative to the ‘chicken nugget’ figure of personhood. Applying discourse analytic methods to participants’ metacommentaries, I demonstrate
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“Really this girl ought to be going to something better”: Rhoticity and social meaning in oral history data Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-06-21 Sadie Durkacz Ryan, Holly Dann, Rob Drummond
This article explores the shift to non-rhoticity in Oldham (UK), using oral history interviews recorded in the 1980s, with speakers born between 1893 and 1929. We first account for the linguistic constraints on /r/ use and explore macro-level social patterns, where the women were more advanced in the change. We investigate this finding further using a modified version of the lectal focusing in interaction
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The epistemics of authentication and denaturalization in the construction of identities in social interaction Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-05-25 Sylvia Sierra
This study merges sociocultural linguistic work on identity construction in interaction with the study of epistemic management in conversation analysis (CA). While some CA scholars have examined identity without relying on epistemics, and others study epistemics without a focus on identity, I hope to contribute to a renewal in the exploration of identity and epistemics in interaction, building on a
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The anatomy of a conspiracy theory in Covid-19 political commentary Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-05-23 Emma Tennent, Fiona Grattan
The pandemic has exacerbated moral panics about conspiracy theories. Yet defining what conspiracy theories are is just as fraught as figuring out what to do about them. This article provides the first empirical demonstration of how the categories ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘conspiracy theorist’ are used in social interaction. We examined comments from a New Zealand politician about a Covid-19 outbreak
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Radical-right populism in Spain and the strategy of chronopolitics Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-05-20 David Divita
Given ongoing debates in Spain over how to reckon with its recent past, time operates as a potent site for doing politics in the Peninsula. In this article, I develop the concept of chronopolitics—that is, the discursive configuration of time or history to advance political projects in the present—by analyzing a speech from the leader of Vox, a radical-right populist party in Spain. Through detailed
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English as a Southern language Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-05-11 M. Obaidul Hamid
Drawing on the epistemologies of the Global South and the sociolinguistic reality of English in postcolonial Bangladesh, this article conceptualises English as a Southern language. This conception recognises the imperative of English for postcolonial societies in an English-dominant world while also emphasising the necessity of breaking away from its hegemony as represented by so-called native speaker
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‘I especially loved the little Nana dancing on the balcony’: The emergence, formation, and circulation of chronotopes in mass-mediated communication Lang. Soc. (IF 2.0) Pub Date : 2022-05-02 Anna De Fina
In this article I focus on the formation and evaluation of chronotopes in social media. More specifically, I analyze the case of a ‘chronotope of the balcony performance’ that emerged in Italy in 2020 during the Covid-19 lockdown. The corpus of the study is constituted by 125 top postings resulting from a Twitter search based on the words Italy, lockdown, and balcony. In line with other scholars (see