Linguistic minority movements have long adopted dominant discourses linking language and community. Analysis of two sites of discursive production in francophone Canada (literacy centers and a call center workplace in Ontario) shows that current socioeconomic changes challenge those discourses. Language and community are uncoupled and redefined as commodities with exchange value in the globalized market for services and information. “Community” serves mainly to legitimize struggles for privileged access to newly commodified linguistic and cultural resources.

This study examines the social functions of codeswitching (CS) between Standard Arabic (SA) and Dialectal Arabic (DA). The data came from thirty-five audio and video recordings in the domains of religious lectures, political debates, and soccer commentaries. The findings suggest that speakers create a functional division between the two varieties by designating issues of importance, complexity, and seriousness to SA, the High code, and aligning less important, less serious, and accessible topics with DA, the Low code. The CS patterns therefore reproduce the unequal social values and distribution of SA and DA in the Arabic sociolinguistic landscape and simultaneously call for a reconceptualization of the notion of diglossia as presented in Ferguson's (1959) work. Other functions of CS as a marker of speakers' attitudes and as an index of pan-Arab or Muslim identities are discussed. (Arabic, bidialectal codeswitching, High/Low dichotomy, functional diglossia, identity, language attitudes)*

This article focuses on adolescents at an inner-London secondary school who are learning German rather reluctantly in a foreign language class, and then using the language to play around elsewhere. I argue that the language teacher's pedagogic methods turned the German lessons into relatively intense institutional rituals, and that the lessons provided symbolic and socio-emotional material that students subsequently inverted in a set of micro-ritual improvisations. There are some endemic problems of evidence in the argument that instructed German was connected to improvised Deutsch by cause-and-effect processes associated with ritual, but the discussion ends by affirming ritual's value as an analytic frame that can be applied both to institutional language learning and to historical shifts in classroom experience.

Scholars have explained working-class speakers’ continued use of stigmatised vernaculars as a response to their relative powerlessness in relation to the standard language market. Research has shown how, in the face of this powerlessness, working-class communities turn to group solidarity, and use of the vernacular is seen as part of this more general orientation. As a result, two competing social values—status and solidarity—have featured prominently in discussions around language and class. I expand these discussions using data from a linguistic ethnographic study of children's language in Teesside, England. I argue that meanings related to status and solidarity operate at multiple levels and cannot be taken for granted, and demonstrate that vernacular forms that lack status within the dominant sociolinguistic economy may be used to assert status within local interactional use. I further advance discussion of the ways local vernaculars might be intimately linked to classed subjectivities. (Social class, variation, solidarity, status, stance, indexicality, identity, interaction, ethnography)*

Bilingual call centers in El Paso, Texas, an extensively bilingual US-Mexico border setting, provide a valuable opportunity to examine empirically what occurs with respect to language shift reversal of Spanish in the context of new information economy. Interviews were conducted with thirty-nine call center operators and managers, and twelve translators and interpreters. Call centers provide an important occupational performance of and recognition to the Spanish language. Nevertheless, bilingual call centers mainly rely on uncompensated, socially provided language skills in Spanish, a freely available “heritage language” in the border setting. Spanish is not valued as a technical competency, worth specific attention to training, management of language features, and extra compensation. Bilingualism is used in the labor market as a sign of cheap and flexible labor, rather than as economically and socially valued “skill,” even though in the new information workplace it serves the latter role. (Call centers, new economy, language and workplace, bilingualism, Spanish, borders)*

Black English is increasingly recognized as a systemic, ‘rule-governed’, form of language (lect), like any other, at least among scholars. There is less adequate understanding of the meaning of Black English to those who use it. Such understanding requires ethnographic study of the place of Black English in the verbal repertoire of the community in which it is used. There has been some work in this area, but much of it has focused on aspects of Black English of interest for linguistic theory, e.g. the possibility of creole origins as a constraint on variability. Such studies have tended not to recognize the full scope and complexity of Black English. The aspects given attention have been those most exotic and remote from conventional English (for criticism on this point, see Abrahams (1972) and Wright (1972) ). While such studies have increased recognition and acceptance of Black English, the model in terms of which they have done so has been implicitly the ‘other culture’ model. There has been an appeal to the acceptance of cultural difference associated in our minds with Ruth Benedict's studies of Patterns of Culture, Margaret Mead's studies in Samoa and New Guinea, etc. This ‘other culture’ model is inadequate to the situation of the Black Community. There is partial truth to it; respect for the ways in which Black Americans may differ from ‘mainstream’ expectations is necessary. But social policy and action, especially in regard to education, cannot be based on so partial a truth. This became clear when well-meaning scholars attempted to introduce elementary school readers that used vernacular Black English. There was great protest from many in the Black community itself.

A historical study of variation in the relative clause marker in Scottish English indicates that sociolinguistic methodology has some important contributions to make to historical linguistics. The use of the frequency with which NPs in certain syntactic positions are relativized as a measure of syntactic complexity reveals that the WH relativization strategy appears to have entered the language in the most complex styles and least frequently relativized syntactic positions, until it eventually spread or diffused throughout the system. The addition of the WH relativization strategy seems to have resulted in a ‘squish’ of two strategies which are opposed in stylistic meaning rather than in actual qualitative change in the relative system. The process of diffusion can be seen as completed as far as the more formal styles of the modern written language are concerned, but it has not really affected the spoken language, where the native TH strategy prevails. (Sociolinguistic methodology, historical linguistics, language change, relativization, history of tle English language)

Assessments of the narrative abilities of patients suffering from Alzheimer's disease should consider the interactions that generate the narratives. By analyzing the discourse of an AD patient in interaction with two different interlocutors, namely her husband and the author, this study calls attention to ways in which one interaction facilitates narratives and the other does not. Previous psycholinguistic research, largely focusing on the resultant narrative, has understood the AD patient's deteriorating narrative skills as a result of the progressively debilitating nature of the disease. This is undoubtedly true, but extensive and meaningful talk is nevertheless possible, partially grounded in and constructed through social interaction. (Discourse analysis, Alzheimer's disease, narrative social interaction)

This article approaches on-going sociolinguistic processes in Copenhagen by focusing on the overt metalinguistic activities of a group of adolescents. The article sheds light on how social power differences are refracted in the metalinsguistic activities of these adolescents in spite of the relatively homogenous (or hegemonic) sociolinguistic conditions of Danish society. In the article, I investigate how social status relations understood as cultural interpretations of societal “high” and “low” are relevant to on-going social value ascriptions to the contrasting ways of speaking labelled “integrated” and “street language.” The metalinguistic data I present points to a sociolinguistic transformation. Linguistic signs that used to be seen as related to migration, on an insider/outsider dimension of comparison, are now related to status on a high/low dimension as well. (Sociolinguistic transformation, ethnicity, social class, enregisterment, metalinguistic reflections)*

This article describes a preliminary experiment looking at possible differences in how females and males interact in conversation. The article analyzes data from an experiment where two females and two males talked to each other in all possible pairs; a total of 60 minutes of conversation (six dyads) was transcribed. The goal was to isolate quantifiable entities related to controlling or directing the conversation. We looked at issues such as who talked how much, how fluently or confidently – and how the two people in the conversation interacted in terms of interruptions and indications of support, agreement, or disagreement. The findings from such a small sample are only relevant to suggest hypotheses for further research. However, we noticed a number of interesting differences: the female speakers used more 1st person pronouns and fewer 3rd person references than the male speakers; the female speakers used mm hmm at a much higher frequency than the male speakers; the female speakers also interrupted each other more; and the female/female conversation seemed more fluent than the other conversations, as measured by number of disfluencies and number of affirmative transitions upon speaker change. All of these differences suggest that this area is a fruitful one for further investigation. (Conversational analysis, gender differences)

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)*

This essay interprets the relation between inalienable possessions and personhood among speakers of Q'eqchi'-Maya living in the cloud forests of Guatemala. In the broadest sense, inalienable possessions are things that are inherently possessed by human beings, such as arms and legs, mothers and fathers, hearts and names. The relation between inalienable possessions and human possessors is analyzed across a variety of domains, ranging from grammatical categories and discursive practices to illness cures and life-cycle rituals. While this relation is figured differently in each domain, a strong resonance between such relations is shown to exist across such domains. For example, the gain and loss of inalienable possessions is related to the expansion and contraction of personhood. This resonance is used as a means to interpret Q'eqchi' understandings of personhood in relation to classic ideas from William James and Marcel Mauss: on the one hand, a role-enabled and role-enabling nexus of value-directed reflexive capabilities; and on the other hand, the material, social, and semiotic site in which this nexus is revealed.This essay was presented to the anthropology departments of Case Western University and Barnard College, the Mesoamerica Workshop at SUNY Albany, and workshops on linguistic anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago. It has greatly benefited from discussions with participants in these forums, especially Asif Agha, Anya Bernstein, Thomas Chordas, Courtney Handman, Walter Little, Elizabeth Povinelli, Lesley Sharp, Michael Silverstein, and Greg Urban. Above all, a course I took from John Lucy, entitled “The Self,” was fundamental to the topic choice and theoretical framing.

In Tlaxcala and Puebla, Mexico, Nahuatl is being replaced by Spanish. Economic and social factors, principally a shift from a peripheral agrarian integration in the Mexican economy to integration as a rural proletariat involved in migratory labor, has been accompanied by a shift in language attitudes which has led to a narrowing of the range of functions of Nahuatl to a function primarily as a “language of solidarity.” This narrowing of function and the accompanying development of ethnic self-consciousness and egalitarianism are expressed through the stigmatization of Spanish loan words, other ethnic boundary-marking usages, the narrowing of honorific usage, and the differentiation of Nahuatl from Spanish grammar in noun-number constructions. (Nahuatl, Spanish, language shift, ethnicity.)

This article investigates a public debate in Germany that put a special spotlight on the interaction of standard language ideologies with social dichotomies, centering on the question of whether Kiezdeutsch, a new way of speaking in multilingual urban neighbourhoods, is a legitimate German dialect. Based on a corpus of emails and postings to media websites, I analyse central topoi in this debate and an underlying narrative on language and identity. Central elements of this narrative are claims of cultural elevation and cultural unity for an idealised standard language ‘High German’, a view of German dialects as part of a national folk culture, and the construction of an exclusive in-group of ‘German’ speakers who own this language and its dialects. The narrative provides a potent conceptual frame for the Othering of Kiezdeutsch and its speakers, and for the projection of social and sometimes racist deliminations onto the linguistic plane. (Standard language ideology, Kiezdeutsch, dialect, public discourse, Othering, racism by proxy)*

Mock white girl (MWG) performances parody a linguistic and embodied style associated with contemporary middle class white girls in the United States. The article identifies bundles of semiotic resources in the stylization of the white girl persona—for example, creaky voice, uptalk, blondeness, and Starbucks—in three genres of MWG: Savior, Shit white girls say, and Teenage girl problems. While semiotic variables used to index the white girl persona are consistent across performances, there is significant variation in performers’ ideological stances relative to the mocked figure of personhood: white girls in the US are not ‘heard’ in any one way by all social actors. Contextualizing MWG performances through analysis of stance reveals critical variation in how the white girl is interpreted, evaluated, and produced as a meaningful social entity by diverse segments of the population. (Gender, mock, race, parody, persona, stance, style)*

For many decades, women's speech has been seen as being very different from that used by men. Stereotyped as swearing less, using less slang, and as aiming for more standard speech style, women were judged according to their sex rather than other aspects of their lives, such as class and economic situation. With many critics now challenging these ideas, this article sets out to look at the reality of the swearing used by a group of women from a deprived inner-city area. Their constant use of strong expletives flies in the face of the theories proffered of the “correctness” of the language of women. (Expletives, taboo words, working-class women, female speech, female group, social networks, sociolinguistics, inner-city England)

This article explores an underappreciated pragmatic constraint on the expression of opinions: When expressing an opinion on a topic that has been previously discussed, a speaker should correctly indicate the cultural standing of that view in the relevant opinion community. This Bakhtinian approach to discourse analysis is contrasted with conversation analysis, politeness theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987), and analysis of epistemic modality. Finally, indicators of four points on the cultural standing continuum (highly controversial, debatable, common opinion, and taken for granted) are illustrated with examples from American English usage.I am grateful for helpful comments from Jane Hill and two anonymous reviewers for Language in Society as well as Justin Beck, Paul Ireland, Ronald Macaulay, Naomi Quinn, Daniel Segal, James Van Cleve, other students in Methods of Discourse Analysis (spring 2001) and Language and Power (spring 2003), and other colleagues who commented on the paper when I presented it at Pitzer College in February 2000.

Under certain circumstances, contextualization cues become powerful means of achieving social order. The social organization of a daily group meeting in an American primary grade classroom is closely examined. Participants recurrently generate certain contexts within the meeting in varying sequence from day to day. Transitions from one to another regularly occur smoothly and unremarkably as interaction unfolds. On some occasions, however, this does not happen. Order breaks down, and the teacher and students implicitly negotiate what the context will be. On the surface, these contrasting patterns seem to arise unpredictably as students choose either to “behave” or “misbehave.” That is how the teacher accounts for them. Nevertheless, a closer analysis shows that they are explainable with reference to some subtle contextualization cues that the teacher, without being consciously aware of it, routinely provides but occasionally omits at context boundaries. Students routinely act on the presence and absence of these cues, which thus become a tacit, jointly constructed means of discourse regulation and social control. Their inadvertant “omission” becomes a recurrent source of interactional trouble. (Context, contextualization cues, classroom discourse, ethnography of speaking)

Recent work in the analysis of conversational discourse has included the study of compliment responses among English-speaking American monolinguals (Pomerantz 1978). This preliminary work suggests that compliment responses are subject to separate constraint systems that involve the receiver's obligation to respond to a compliment while at the same time avoiding self-praise.

This paper examines compliment responses, within the framework provided by Pomerantz, in conversational interactions between bilingual Mexican-American speakers. The strategies used by these speakers are compared with those used by monolingual English-speaking Americans and with those used by monolingual Spanish-speaking Latin Americans.