Title VII of the U.S. Civil Rights Act clearly forbids an employer to discriminate against persons of color for reasons of personal or customer preference. Similarly, a qualified job applicant may not be rejected on the basis of linguistic traits linked to national origin. In contrast to racial discrimination, however, an employer has considerable latitude in matters of language, provided in part by a judicial system which recognizes in theory the link between language and social identity, but in practice is often confounded by blind adherence to a standard language ideology. The nature and repercussions of this type of linguistic discrimination are here explored. (Language and law, accent, discrimination, standard language ideology, critical language studies)

This longitudinal study examines the construction of the apprenticeship relationshiP between professor (expert) and graduate student (novice) during office-hour interactions. The findings demonstrate that apprenticeship is constituted by the strategic use of affect-indexing linguistic markers in discourse. By indexing stances of cooperativeness, interdependence, and shared Discourse membership, professor and student create a positive affect bond which provides a linguistic means of negotiating miscommunication arising from the student's incomplete socialization to the target Discourse. The socialization process is shown to proceed through a series of interim Discourses where quantifiable shifts in the participants' discourse strategies reveal the student's increasing mastery of the target Discourse. Constraints imposed by the institutional setting are also shown to structure the discourse strategies which characterize the interim Discourses. The results of this study strongly suggest that affect plays a measurable role in the process of language socialization, and is essential for defining “trusf”-based apprenticeship relationships. (Affect, language socialization, discourse analysis, apprenticeship)

This study examines how identification and recognition is achieved in Swedish telephone conversation openings, and compares the patterning of Swedish telephone openings with the analyses of telephone conversation openings in other linguistic communities. The analysis suggests that Swedes overwhelmingly self-identify by name over the telephone, like Dutch interactants: but Swedes also avail themselves of the recognitional resources that have been found within American materials to achieve recognition without explicit name-proffer. This finding bears on orientations toward formality and informality in Swedish culture. (Conversation analysis, telephone conversation openings, communication and culture)

Children in many African societies have meaningful names – unlike their Western counterparts, whose names are primarily labels. In Zulu, Xhosa, Sotho, Tswana, and many other cultures, namegivers traditionally chose personal names that pointed to a range of people and circumstances that were relevant at the time of the child's birth. These highly individual or unique names were part of particular social frameworks that have long been evolving with Western acculturation. Like the social frameworks within which they are embedded, naming practices are in the process of change.

This article investigates change in Zulu naming practices as a reflection of wider social changes. Taking historical accounts as the source of traditional namegiving, an analysis of rural, farm, and urban names shows quantitative and qualitative differences in naming practices. Contemporary names differ significantly from traditional ones, and provide evidence that the world view within which names are given is in the process of redefinition. (Anthropological linguistics, naming, South Africa, Zulu)