Romani is a fascinating test case for the role that language plays in the process of identity consolidation in a transnational context. Standardisation is no longer inherently connected to the ‘territorialisation’ of language. Instead, we witness a bottom-up process in which individuals take ownership of language and negotiate language practices. Status regulation and language planning can be instigated and even implemented by institutions other than national states. All of this leads to pluralism of form rather than unification. Yet language remains a key locus for political mobilisation. It allows players to claim authenticity, it offers opportunities for intervention by external facilitators, and it provides a discussion platform through which traditional images can be challenged and recognition can be awarded. (Romani, language planning, standardization, language policy, transnationalism)*

The It Gets Better project has been held up as a model of successful social media activism. This article explores how narrators of It Gets Better videos make use of generic intertextuality, strategically combining the canonical narrative genres of the exemplum, the testimony, and the confession in a way that allows them to claim ‘textual authority’ and to make available multiple moral positions for themselves and their listeners. This strategy is further facilitated by the ambiguous participation frameworks associated with digital media, which make it possible for storytellers to tell different kinds of stories to different kinds of listeners at the same time, to simultaneously comfort the victims of anti-gay violence, confront its perpetrators, and elicit sympathy from ‘onlookers’. This analysis highlights the potential of new practices of online storytelling for social activism, and challenges notions that new media are contributing to the demise of common narrative traditions. (Activism, digital media, genre, LGBT discourse, narrative, positioning)*

This article investigates a public debate in Germany that put a special spotlight on the interaction of standard language ideologies with social dichotomies, centering on the question of whether Kiezdeutsch, a new way of speaking in multilingual urban neighbourhoods, is a legitimate German dialect. Based on a corpus of emails and postings to media websites, I analyse central topoi in this debate and an underlying narrative on language and identity. Central elements of this narrative are claims of cultural elevation and cultural unity for an idealised standard language ‘High German’, a view of German dialects as part of a national folk culture, and the construction of an exclusive in-group of ‘German’ speakers who own this language and its dialects. The narrative provides a potent conceptual frame for the Othering of Kiezdeutsch and its speakers, and for the projection of social and sometimes racist deliminations onto the linguistic plane. (Standard language ideology, Kiezdeutsch, dialect, public discourse, Othering, racism by proxy)*

This study investigates the construction of political identity in the 2011–2012 US Republican presidential primary debates. Focusing on candidates’ self-introductions, I analyze how candidates use references to family members and roles to frame their political identities or ‘presidential selves’. Family references are shown to (i) frame candidates’ personal identities as family men/women; (ii) interweave the spheres of home and politics and consequently, their private and public selves; (iii) serve as a tool of discursive one-upmanship in self-introduction sequences; and (iv) demonstrate intimate familiarity and expertise on the topic of national security. This study extends research on family discourse and identity by examining the rhetorical function of mentioning family-related identities in explicitly persuasive public discourse, and contributes to sociolinguistic research on political discourse by examining how family identities serve as a resource for framing political identities. (Discourse analysis, framing, family, identity, political discourse, presidential debates, sequentiality)

This article examines the discourse about race and racism that ensued in the US media after the shooting death of an African American youth, Trayvon Martin, by a neighborhood watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, in February 2012. The analysis examines news programs from the three major cable television channels in the United States: CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. The theoretical framework builds upon Hill's (2008) discussion of the ‘folk theory of race and racism’ in contrast to critical race theory, and asks, to what extent does the mainstream media's discourse about race remain embedded in folk ideas and to what extent (if at all) does the conversation move beyond those ideas? The paper aims to unpack the ideologies of race and language that underpin talk about race and racism in an effort to expose the hidden assumptions in the discourse that hinder more productive dialogue on the topic. (Critical race theory, folk theory of race and racism, George Zimmerman, ideology, language ideology, media discourse, race, race talk, racism, slurs, Trayvon Martin)*

Haas's (1944) typology of nonreferential gender indexicality attested three basic varieties: speaker indexing, addressee indexing, and ‘mixed’ (or relational) speaker-addressee gender indexing. In an earlier publication in Language in Society this author adopted the same framework for the treatment of a large sample of cases of categorical gender indexicality. However, subsequent review of cases where gender indexicality seemingly interacts with sex-based semantic gender suggests that Haas' typology is incomplete. A relational speaker-referent indexing type is proposed. Focusing on gender indexicality in Chiquitano (Bolivia) and Yanyuwa (Australia), the author argues that these cases have been erroneously treated as systems in which speaker gender is indexed in the denotation of referent gender. It is shown that a more parsimonious analysis can account for these cases by means of a single purely pragmatic gender feature distributed over a relational speaker-referent indexical focus. (Gender, indexicality, deixis)*