This article examines how voiceless th-stopping (e.g. ting for thing) is used by a group of adolescents in Manchester, UK. The data come from an ethnographic project into the speech of fourteen to sixteen year olds who have been excluded from mainstream education. Although th-stopping is often strongly associated with black varieties of English, multiple regression analysis finds ethnicity not to be a statistically significant factor in its production. Instead, conversational context and involvement in aspects of particular social practices—grime (rap) and dancehall music—emerge as potentially more relevant. Subsequent interactional analysis adds support to this interpretation, illustrating how the feature is being used more or less strategically (and more or less successfully) by individuals in this context in order to adopt particular stances, thereby enacting particular identities that are only tangentially related to ethnicity. I argue that use of th-stopping in this context indexes a particular street identity that is made more available through participation in grime especially. (th-stopping, youth language, identity, ethnography, grime, hip hop)*

In this article, we show how the hashtag #jesuisCharlie, created following the attack on Charlie Hebdo, gave rise to the use of many other hashtags starting with #jesuis, across languages. Through a corpus-based analysis, we show how the meaning of #jesuis broadened from expressing condolence and support following terrorist attacks over expressing condolence for other (violent) deaths to a more general marker of solidarity and alignment. This broadening of meaning is parallel to a formal evolution of the stem jesuis. Moreover, these hashtags have become emblematic of a particular kind of Twitter user. Furthermore, disaligning uses developed, including mocking uses, which disalign both with certain causes (disalignment de re) and with the process of using jesuis as a means of expressing solidarity (disalignment de dicto). Thus, this variety of uses shows that Twitter users exploit the interpersonal possibilities of hashtags to express alignment and disalignment, creating ambient affiliation. (Hashtag, #jesuisCharlie, solidarity, alignment, emblem, mocking, pragmatic functions)*

‘Arabrew’ denotes a mixture of the languages that index two nations known for their seemingly intractable conflict. It is supposedly spoken by Palestinians and other Arabs who are citizens of Israel. Evidence from the field gathered in 2015 shows some codeswitching, especially inter-sentential, and borrowing, mostly of nouns for specialist terminology, and of a few discourse markers. This does not support the claim that a new variety has emerged, yet the debate around it channels concerns about nonlinguistic issues relating to the political economy of Israel and to anxieties about Israeli-Palestinian relations. This debate invokes ideologies, including language ideologies, of nationalism, colonialism, liberalism, and more, that are identifiably linked to the historical and material contexts. The study uses critical discourse analysis and contact linguistics to outline the articulation between distinctions of national identity, socioeconomic class, the way people speak, and the way this speech is ideologically received. (Arabic, Hebrew, codeswitching, ideology)*

This article brings together research on migration and identity in translocal and superdiverse contexts, and the recently expanding interest in narratives and interaction in social media, by examining the construction of identities in narratives shared in a private Facebook group message. The participants are former fellow refugees from Poland who reconnected on Facebook after two decades. The article analyzes three narratives produced in response to the researcher's question about ethnic and national affiliations. Using Bucholtz & Hall's (2004) tactics of intersubjectivity framework, this study examines the complex and conflicting ways in which individuals position themselves with respect to various contexts of belonging and difference (Meinhof & Galasiński 2005) that emerge in their narratives. I argue that the narratives show a link between essentialist or nonessentialist views of ethnicity/nationality, and the teller's assumed agency over her identity. The study also discusses new possibilities for discursive practices in social media contexts. (Narrative, migration, social media, identity, belonging)

This article combines ethnographic and linguistic analysis to illuminate a critical aspect of the US criminal justice system—disciplinary hearings in prison. Focusing on one woman's (Cherry's) hearing, I consider the remaking of power through bureaucratic procedure. The scripted interaction requires the sergeant to read Cherry's ticket out loud in his performance of authority. I explore the intertextual relations motivated by this verbal animation for their ability to construct a unified front of the institution against which Cherry is tried. Cherry, however, manipulates these intertextual relationships, deploying verbal skills gained through her long entanglement with the criminal justice system to mitigate her punishment. The linguistic analysis of Cherry's hearing, positioned in her prison history, reveals the continual remaking of power in prison interactions that are framed by institutional regulations influencing the negotiation of officer authority and possibilities of inmate resistance. (Prisons, intertextuality, resistance, power, legal interactions)*