This article examines the influence of language ecology on bilingual speech. It is based on first-hand data from two previously undocumented varieties of Romani and Pomak in contact with Turkish in Greek Thrace; in both cases Turkish is an important language for the community's identity. This analysis shows how the Romani-Turkish “fused lect” was produced by intensive and extensive bilingualism through colloquial contact with the trade language, Turkish. In addition, it shows how semi-sedentary Pomak speakers had limited, institutional contact with Turkish, resulting in more traditional codeswitching and emblematic lexical borrowings. (Language contact, bilingual speech, fused lect, language ecology, Pomak, Romani, Turkish, Greece)*

The topic of this article is how conversationalists deal with emergent problems of reference in the construction of a turn at talk. It analyzes practices for modifying and expanding a turn-constructional unit in progress to accommodate information that will introduce a referent to the interlocutor or check his or her familiarity with it. One set of practices expands the turn after the referring expression has been produced: apokoinou constructions and appositions. A second, and previously undescribed, practice is identified by which speakers insert referent identification before the referring expression has been produced. In this practice, speakers initiate two separate sentence structures and complete them both by merging them in a common complement. This practice has the advantage of embedding the subordinate activity of establishing reference within the main sentence frame, and furthermore minimizes the disruption of sequential progressivity of the talk. (Turn construction, reference, expansions, apokoinou, apposition, progressivity)*

This article focuses on the question of how systems of expectations for social conduct develop in a context characterized by diversity and transience. The empirical focus is a series of women's neighborhood meetings in a transient urban milieu in Indonesia. Drawing on work on semiotic register formation, I argue that expectations for social conduct within this neighborhood are constructed through the positioning of self and others in talk across speech situations. In doing so, I explore interdiscursive relationships between this conversational activity and more perduring signs of personhood and social relations. (Enregisterment, identity, Indonesia, migration, trust)*

In his landmark contribution to the field of language shift/maintenance, Fishman maintains that, for language shift to be reversed, “face-to-face, small-scale social life must be pursued in their own right and focused upon directly.” This article responds to this call to examine language shift at the level of face-to-face interaction. It describes a specific interactional practice, referred to as “medium request,” observed in the Rwandan community in Belgium, where language shift is taking place from Kinyarwanda-French bilingualism to French monolingualism. The practice consists in the fact that younger members of the community, when in interaction with adult members, constantly (albeit indirectly) request the latter to “medium-switch” from Kinyarwanda to French. The article therefore describes the practice as a specific type of language/medium negotiation, examines its various strategies, and shows how, through this interactional practice, members of the community actually talk language shift into being. (Medium request, language shift, language maintenance, language/medium negotiation, other-initiated medium repair, embedded medium repair, generalized content repair, targeted content repair, understanding check)