This commentary examines environmental conservation work as a site of climate (in)justice, drawing from fieldwork at a highly multilingual Cameroonian wildlife sanctuary, as well as prior work on linguistic diversity, language ideologies, and intercultural communication. Across the world, climate justice work is occurring in landscapes that are often linguistically diverse. Alongside indigenous languages

This study examines the variable use and the social meaning of a contact‐induced phenomenon in Basque, Differential Object Marking, to explain the emergence of new variation in a minoritized language situation. The spontaneous speech of 77 Basque–Spanish bilinguals was analyzed and compared to the perception results obtained from a matched‐guise experiment. I situate this analysis using emergent participant

This text provides a review of the earlier and more influential works of Valencian sociolinguists Lluís Vicent Aracil and Rafael Lluís Ninyoles, which had a significant impact in the field from the 1960s to the 1980s, particularly in a number of European minoritized language communities and Latin America. I provide a summary account of their main theoretical innovations, embodied in concepts such as

Many studies of complaints‐in‐interaction have examined long sequences. This paper, by contrast, scrutinises a series of complaints produced within the same participation framework across four successive encounters. The data comprise audio‐recorded talk between an older woman (the complainant) and her stylist in a hair salon. Drawing on conversation analysis and membership categorisation analysis,

This article analyses narratives presented by teenage Irish‐speakers about encounters between new speakers of Irish and locals in Gaeltacht (traditionally Irish‐speaking) areas. It demonstrates how two conflicting ideologies of legitimate language promoted by the state in the establishment and maintenance of Irish as ‘the national language’ alienate young new speakers of Irish and young Gaeltacht‐based

This paper examines the use of Hebrew and Yiddish in the linguistic landscape of Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter of Krakow, Poland. Specifically, I examine how the use of these languages in primarily symbolic modes as a part of the Jewish ethnolinguistic repertoire is a part of the creation of three different types of Jewish places in the quarter. These places present different stances towards whether

What makes the work of the American Abstract Expressionist, Mark Rothko, great? Critics and the galleries of the world which hold his paintings, especially those he painted in his typical style of vertically arranged blocks of colour after the critical year 1949, often present his work using terms such as ‘ethereal’, ‘spiritual’, ‘luminous’, ‘mystical’, ‘sublime’. But this discourse about Rothko appears

This paper contributes to disentangling hybridity from assumptions about marginality, resistance and the dissolution of boundaries in sociolinguistic scholarship. To do so, it examines how speakers make certain types of hybrid identities (im)possible through their discursive practices of scaling. Focusing on post‐soviet, Central Asian migrants in the United States, I demonstrate how their discourses

One of the most widespread developments in sociolinguistics over the past 20 years has been the claim that meaning is contingent. Pushing back against a belief in language as a stable reflection of social structure, research across the field has focused on the diverse ways that meanings emerge in context, the processes through which such meanings are regimented and evaluated by competing ideological

Inspired by Bourdieu's work, this study draws on multidisciplinary datasets to unravel the role of language and symbolic power for retaining social hierarchies and crafting ‘distinctive’ selves in postcolonial times. Showcasing Mozambique's capital city of Maputo, the study relies on censuses from the period 1980 to 2017, historical data, interviews and metadiscursive reflection to problematize how

This critical sociolinguistic study explores how mining work is governed in the name of security in a mine in Arctic Finland. Although the mining industry is dominated by multinational corporations, mines themselves tend to be concentrated in peripheries where a mobile and multilingual workforce is recruited. Mining is a high‐risk business: industrial accidents and environmental damage can be severe

While sociolinguists defined the regional sound changes around the linguistic behavior of White speakers, recent work has shown that racialized speakers employ local sound changes in socially meaningful ways. Advocating for an approach which places race and races place, this work views racialized speakers as authentic locals, situating their linguistic behavior in the context of their communities.

This project explores the sociolinguistic experiences of black American students in predominantly/historically white higher education settings. Through interviews with 30 black undergraduates at two different types of institutions, we show how language is a salient factor in racialization and racism on American college campuses. Both sets of students discussed stereotype threat (being at risk of negative

Kamran Khan's concise volume is a timely, engaging and propitious contribution to an increasingly important area of research for sociolinguists troubled by institutionally engineered precarity and marginalization, namely language in citizenship. This is a field that has been primarily concerned with issues pertaining to language testing for migrant citizenship/naturalization (e.g. Shohamy, 2006), although

This paper presents an interdiscursive analysis of a public apology made before the International Criminal Court (ICC) by a Malian Islamist accused of the destruction of cultural heritage in Timbuktu. It analyzes (a) how the defendant's apology metapragmatically inserts itself into a multiplicity of chronotopes and (b) how the two defense counsels subsequently reformulate that apology as part of a

This article looks to the assassination of Marielle Franco, a queer Black councilwoman from the Complexo da Maré favela in Rio de Janeiro, to outline a principled metacomunicative action toward “hope.” Empirically, it unpacks features of the pragmatics of her discourse, along with that of mourners who knew her. We identify two main features in their discourse that point to the enregisterment of hope

The article examines the linguistic, material, and multimodal aspects of professional communication in guided tours in the Himalayas in Nepal. Using an ethnography‐informed interactional sociolinguistics, the study analyses the key instances of miscommunication between an American tourist and an ethnic Tamang guide to understand how various identities are invoked by the participants. As the article

This study considers whether localized language training for call centers can fruitfully challenge the homogenizing principles of call center practices by examining a training program that aimed to familiarize offshore call center workers with Pidgin, the creole language that is widely spoken in Hawaiʻi. Call center agents in Dominica were familiarized with key aspects of Pidgin relevant to call center

Using multimodal conversation analysis this article examines embodied and tactile greetings in social interaction, documenting their change during the Covid‐19 pandemic. Recognizing social interaction as foundational for human sociality, we consider greetings as a crucial normative, organizational, and ritual practice for mutually engaging in intersubjective action. Analyses use video recordings made

Japan's rapidly aging population and chronic labor shortages have led the country to consider increased reliance on foreign workers. The government promotes the cultivation of nihongo jinzai ‘Japanese language human resources’ (MOFA, 2013), that is, highly skilled foreign workers proficient in the de facto national language, but in reality, such ideal individuals are scarce. Workplaces thus must explore

The purpose of this paper is the identification of linguistic features that work to co‐construct identities and meaning making processes in a transnational medical consultation. Health scholarship has demonstrated that the medical consultation is essentially an interview that tends to be controlled by the medical provider. However, this paper demonstrates that the epistemic status and stance attributed

This introductory article explains the need for interactional analyses of workplace communication, which is increasingly multilingual and multimodal in expansive spatiotemporal contexts and layered frames. It provides an overview of how neoliberal economic conditions have impacted workplace communication, generating new task structures and communicative practices. Arguing that there is a need to situate

Drawing from Interactional Sociolinguistics (IS), this article presents an analysis of a Research Group Meeting in Microbiology occurring at a mid‐western US university. We focus on the performance of a South Korean postdoctoral scholar who claims limited proficiency in English and demonstrate how he makes valued contributions by leveraging embodied semiotic resources alongside verbal ones. The analysis

This article uses conversation analysis to examine constructions like who the fuck is that—sequence‐initiating actions into which an expletive like the fuck has been inserted. We describe how this turn‐constructional practice fits into and constitutes a recurrent sequence of escalating actions. In this sequence, it is used to pursue an adequate response after an inadequate one was given, and sanction

Critical sociolinguistics has demonstrated that the social construct of the ‘native speaker’ has a strong impact on people's lives, but research on ‘native speaker effects’ in the workplace remains rare. This article examines such effects from the perspective of four ‘native English speaker’ trainees on temporary contracts in a multilingual European Union institution in Luxembourg. Applying the framework

Cognitive models of sociolinguistics must support a wide range of goal‐oriented behavior (e.g. Eckert, 2000a) without suggesting unrealistic levels of deliberative control on the part of speakers. The current study investigates the limits of deliberative control in audiovisual face‐voice perception. Perceivers evaluated co‐present recorded speech and static face pictures, rating the stimuli on the

Recent work on scale has emphasized upscaling, or the ways people try to make their discourse seem more universal and authoritative. To explore how people engage in other kinds of scale jumping, I examine how scaling practices vary among policymakers and activists in the US English‐only movement. This ethnographic, discourse analytic study focuses on people who shape language policy in four counties

In building upon sociolinguistic work which highlights the continuities and contradictions of capitalism, this article proposes an understanding of Taylorised and flexible forms of production as a dialectical and contradictory unity, which can push and pull those within production in contradictory directions. As a means to illustrate what a dialectical approach to contradiction might offer sociolinguistics

This paper contrasts different approaches taken in research on language and race vs. language and class. It looks at the timescales, units of analysis, and phenomena that have drawn scholars’ attention, and considers how each subfield approaches the study of language and inequality.

Language and social justice in practice Netta Avineri Laura R. Graham Eric J. Johnson Robin Conley Riner Jonathan Rosa (Eds.) New York, NY: Routledge. 2019. 248 pp. Hb (9781138069442) £115.00 / Pb (9781138069459) £30.99 / Ebook: (9781315115702) £15.50. Language policy and linguistic justice: Economic, philosophical and sociolinguistic approaches Michele Gazzola Torsten Templin Bengt‐Arne Wickstrom

The paper evaluates spatial, behavioural, and material signalling of social class in African contexts, focusing on Kenya and Zambia. In particular, it draws on notions of mode of class signalling and intersectionality and a vignette of an interaction between urban‐based Western educated development agents and local participants in rural Kenya to illustrate how social class is implicated in interactions

Stereotypes are chronotopic (Bakhtin, 1994) in the sense that they make good use of character types in time and space to utter identifiable speech forms and make evident other semiotic displays. This paper argues for sociolinguistics to expand its interpretation of the chronotope to encompass the relationship between “character” and “author” in identity texts. It suggests that conflating author and

Spurred in part by violent conflict and natural disaster, the surge in global migration calls for renewed attention to the central role of language in everyday (in)securitization. In this brief response, I draw on my work in the Middle East and among Arabic‐speaking populations in the United States to offer some illustration of the instantiation of global, macro‐processes of (in)securitization and

This Journal of Sociolinguistics dialogue starts from the perception that existential threats to national security have become an increasingly pervasive concern in daily life, spreading fear and suspicion through civil society. Communicative practices play a central role in these processes of (in)securitization, but sociolinguists appear to have paid them less attention than they deserve. So in what

This paper examines the apparent time evolution of the Northern Cities Vowel Shift among 42 White speakers in one Chicago community. We analyse quantitative patterns of community‐wide vocalic change alongside individual speakers’ lived experiences and attitudes. We find that some features of the Shift are dramatically reversing at the community level, and that changing demographics and social concerns

In this commentary, the author offers three related perspectives regarding (in)securitization: first, an overview of ongoing discussions taking place among US‐based ethnographers of colour about the effects of surveillance on ethnography; second, an example of the impact that (in)securitization may have on the researcher/researched relationship in contemporary ethnographic research; and third, an extension

This contribution discusses the ways people hold themselves and others accountable for everyday practices of surveillance. It analyses three examples: (1) the “breeching experiments” of the video artist “Surveillance Camera Man,” (2) a “stop and frisk” incident involving a 17‐year‐old boy in Harlem, and (3) the pop‐up windows on websites that ask for users’ consent to use “cookies.” Understanding the

The discourse of some of the most powerful public figures in today’s world is often incoherent and nonsensical. Incoherent yet authoritative discourse shows that authority does not rest in language but results from non‐linguistic and pre‐textual conditions. The non‐linguistic and pre‐textual conditions are exemplified in an Australian case‐study of a media debate between the Immigration Minister and

The growing political power of racialized groups in white‐supremacist societies has unsettled the hegemonic position of whiteness. In the United States, this political shift has led to the linguistic repositioning of whiteness within public discourse as visible and vulnerable rather than unmarked and dominant; such repositioning operates as part of a larger strategy for maintaining white supremacy

Conceptual linearity and analytic parochialism (aka focus) can make it more difficult for sociolinguists or discourse analysts to apprehend the far‐reaching, exploitative ways inequality is nowadays produced. A suitably material‐cum‐materialist class critique certainly entails empirical and phenomenological worlds flagged by, for example, multi‐sited ethnographies but otherwise side‐lined as merely

The article explores the perplexing outcomes of comparative research projects in London and Paris on language change in multilingual areas of the cities populated by large numbers of recent immigrants with very diverse language backgrounds. In London, as in many other northern European cities, language contact on such a large scale has resulted in the emergence of a “multiethnolect”: a repertoire of

This article examines the 2014 Navajo Nation presidential primary election and language debate as a window into the politics of Navajo heritage language and identity. Using Facebook posts written in response to a videotaped hearing testing the fluency of one of the candidates that subsequently went viral, we analyse social citizenship and stigmatized language identities through the lens of critical

Recent work in applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, and language education has called for the “return” of class in the critical examination of the role of language in society and education under the organizing logic of capitalist globalization. Nevertheless, while the restoration of class as a core aspect of sociolinguistic analysis is much welcome, it has also come with its own ideological erasures:

In recent decades, sociolinguists have begun to challenge the traditional view that multilingualism is fundamentally composed of discrete systems known as ‘languages’. Supporting the assessment that languages are not bounded entities but sociocultural and ideological constructions, this article explores commercial advertisements in France, which are subject to language policies assuming that ‘French’

This paper sets out to focus the “linguistic construction of publics” (Gal & Woolard, 2014 [2001]: 1) in a sense of the word that is often excluded from sociolinguistic discussion of linguistic action in the public sphere: it discusses how the public is constructed as an indexical (‘auratic’) arena, and a field for positioning, in sociolinguistic research. The paper attempts to point out how the public

The article explores the emotional regimes of settler colonialism in post‐apartheid South Africa. The focus is on apocalyptic fears of the imagined eradication of whiteness. These fears are articulated in response to postcolonial/decolonial interpellations of abject whiteness, and are made visible in a range of sensational signs that circulate online and offline. The signs cluster around two themes

This issue examines struggles over public discursive power in late modern society, understanding that late modern publics are characterized by a destabilization of formerly unmarked public authorities, in other words, an unsettling of standardized “voices from nowhere” (Gal & Woolard, 2001). The contributions to the issue illustrate traditional social and academic elites’ discursive reactions to such

This article explores the potential role of attitudes as motivating factors in language variation and change. This study represents an important departure from existing scholarship through its consideration of quantitative measures of language attitudes as factors in multivariate analyses of linguistic data. Four morphosyntactic variables in Northern Catalan (an obsolescent variety spoken in France)

This paper examines the role of register‐making in constructing and evoking authority for political discourses. Three aspects of such enregisterment are defined and exemplified: clasping, relaying, and grafting. Though they occur together in any case of enregisterment, these processes are analytically separable. As registers circulate, they link arenas of social action, creating relations of authority

Linguistic features that index ethnic identities often originate in another language spoken by the same community, often involving the introduction of exogenous features absent from the mainstream variety. We examine the more unusual situation of Hebrew spoken by Arabic–Hebrew bilingual Palestinians, where the pharyngeal consonants, which occur in both Arabic and Hebrew monolingual varieties, serve

This article examines the co‐occurring realization of two sociophonetic variables within a style—the LOT vowel in English and word‐initial /l/—to explore the link between articulatory setting and stylistic practice. At an arts‐focused high school in the San Francisco Bay Area, the curricular and social practices of students in the technical theatre department centre around manual labour. Ethnographic

This paper examines how American listeners’ expectations of non‐native English speech from speakers of East Asian descent can be modulated by the persona invoked by a speaker's visual display. While prior work has typically linked expectations of non‐native speaker status with East Asian‐ness broadly construed, this study indicates that US listeners’ expectations can be tied to more particular manifestations

An analysis of one narrative shows how loudness of voice acquires indexical meaning in interaction and becomes a resource for the narrator to position himself along an axis of social differentiation defined in terms of morality. The narrative was collected among young, male, migrant hip hop artists in Delhi who experienced ethnic othering. In the narrative, loudness registers are used to establish

Recent computational sociolinguistic analyses of social media have emphasized the potential of using orthographic variation as a proxy for speech, thereby permitting macro‐level quantitative studies of regional and social variation (e.g. Eisenstein, 2015). However, the extent to which stylistic variation may affect these analyses remains largely unexplored. In this paper, I explore how authors use

In seeking to understand the political projects underlying pedagogical choices, this article studies the reasons for and situated dynamics of the implementation of the “Rule of Irish” (or Riail na Gaeilge), which prohibits the use of English in Irish immersion language camps (“summer colleges”) set in Ireland's officially designated Irish‐speaking regions, the Gaeltacht. Despite the great difficulty

Debates over medium of instruction, as ideological skirmishes, showcase discursive identity construction, reproduction, and contestation by different social groups. Drawing on such debates in letters to the editor and internet‐based newsgroup posts written by Bangladeshi English‐medium (EM) and Bangla‐medium (BM) educated writers, this article examines the construction of elite identity by the EM educated

The concept of muda refers to how specific biographical moments can precipitate changes in the speaker's linguistic repertoire (Pujolar & Gonzàlez, 2012). In recent years, more inclusive or participatory approaches to intergenerational transmission in language revitalization contexts have been encouraging all parents, including those with low proficiency in the minority language, to participate in

When a person in crisis threatens suicide, police negotiators engage them in a conversation to prevent death. Working in small teams, the primary negotiator's role is to talk directly to the person in crisis. A secondary negotiator, working “behind the scenes,” supports the ongoing negotiation. Using 31 hours of audio‐recorded British negotiations, we uncover the backstage work of secondary negotiators

Drawing from the various theoretical constructs and analyses of class in sociology, economics, cultural studies, and sociolinguistics, I discuss a number of issues regarding class and possible future research avenues for sociolinguists. These include addressing and exploring how to move beyond the static categorical groupings of class membership, including those of researchers themselves in their work

Minority language education initiatives often aim to resist dominant language regimes and to raise the social status of migrant or autochthonous minorities. We consider how participating children experience these alternative language regimes by analysing drawings made by children in two minority education settings—a Slovene‐German bilingual school in Austria and an Isthmus Zapotec (Indigenous) language