This article develops an interpretive perspective on public displays of bilingualism. Photographic data from contemporary Wales illustrate how public bilingual—Welsh and English—displays are organized in different frames, reflecting historically changing language-ideological priorities and more local symbolic markets. In institutionally driven displays, the Welsh language is framed as an autonomous code in parallel with English, displacing an earlier pattern of representing Welsh subordinated to English norms. In other frames Welsh is constructed as the only legitimate heartland language, or as an impenetrable cultural curiosity. In the most open and least institutionalized frame, Welsh is displayed as part of a culturally distinctive but syncretic cultural system. These framing contests dramatize deeper tensions that surface in attempts to revitalize minority languages under globalization. (Wales, Welsh, bilingualism, language display, language ideology, linguistic landscapes, metaculture)*

This article is concerned with how social actors establish relations between language, the body, and the physical and social environment. The empirical focus is a series of interactions between Deaf-Blind people and tactile signed language interpreters in Seattle, Washington. Many members of the Seattle Deaf-Blind community were born deaf and, due to a genetic condition, lose their vision slowly over the course of many years. Drawing on recent work in language and practice theory, I argue that these relations are established by Deaf-Blind people through processes of integration whereby continuity between linguistic, embodied, and social elements of a fading visual order are made continuous with corresponding elements in an emerging tactile order. In doing so, I contribute to current attempts in linguistic anthropology to model the means by which embodied, linguistic, and social phenomena crystallize in relational patterns to yield worlds that take on the appearance of concreteness and naturalness. (Classifiers, Deaf-Blind, integration, interpretation, language and embodiment, practice, rhythm, Tactile American Sign Language, tactility)*

This article focuses on how specific types of language use connect socially, geographically, and temporally distant speakers and span face-to-face and mediated language contexts. It examines one variety of political language (the Northern League register in Italy) in order to analyze how the interdiscursive potentials of register and stance-taking enable such connections. It also presents the metapragmatic effects of engaging in types of talk such as political language, which are less about individual expression or political participation, but are rather part of a complex of stance-taking and alignment of self within local and national political debates. Based on long-term ethnographic and linguistic research in Bergamo, Italy, this article introduces the concept of the interdiscursive trap, showing how the Northern League register functions in this capacity, forging indexical links to particular ideas and stances that some speakers find undesirable. (Political language, interdiscursivity, register, stance, Italy, Europe, Northern League, media)*

This article examines the interactional construction of language competence in bilingual immigrant communities. The focus is on how participants in social interaction resolve problems of understanding that are demonstrably rooted in their divergent linguistic and cultural expertise. Using the methodology of conversation analysis to examine mundane video-recorded conversations in Russian-American immigrant families, I describe a previously unanalyzed communicative practice for solving understanding problems: by one participant enacting the role of a language broker in a repair sequence. The article thus contributes to the existing research on the interactional construction of language competence, on the one hand, and on the organization of repair and its relationship to social epistemics, on the other. (Language brokering, repair, conversation analysis, social epistemics, multiparty conversation, Russian, immigrant families, intercultural communication)*