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)

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)*

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