Discussions of Negro non-standard English (or Black English) emphasizes the most socially stigmatizing features. It is clear, however, that within anglophonic black communities a diglossia situation occurs in which the high form is a speaking variety close to oratorical standard English. This paper explores how this high variety is learned in one Afro-American peasant community in the West Indies as an illustration of the social and ritual importance of certain codes. (diglossia, Creole languages, the formal teaching of speech varieties, oratory.)

This article proposes a comprehensive model of the SPEECH COMMUNITY in sociolinguistics that reworks Labov's model, which has been criticized as being restrictive. Fieldork in non-metropolitan Mexico demonstrates the utility of our model, which can be applied across both urban and non-urban domains. It is compatible with the Milroys' central mechanism for the description of individual speech usage and group cohesion or susceptibility to change in terms of the social network. Based on linguistic variable types, this model has a hierarchy of four nested fields (speech community configurations) into which each individual is placed, according to his/her demonstrated recognition of the social evaluation associated with the variables. At the most local configuration, speakers demonstrate no knowledge of generally stigmatized variables; in the second, speakers register an awareness of stigmatized variables; in the third, an awareness of stigmatized and regional variables; and in the fourth, speakers model standard variants over regional ones. This model classifies the kinds of sociolinguistic variables that are pertinent in this social setting and also provides a structured manner for dealing with dialect contact dynamics. (Speech community, social network, Spanish, Mexico, dialect, diffusion, variables.)

Studies on language shift often refer to the demise of the ousted variety by detailing various stages of language decay and extinction. Problematic for these accounts are well-documented cases of intervening social phenomena, such as language revival movements, which can alter in some way the stages of decline. French Louisiana's situation illustrates language shift interacting with a strong revival movement. In the wake of the revival and in spite of continued shift, another trend is apparent – the writing of Louisiana French. Whereas shift clearly represents a stage of language decline, the creation of a written code functions as a key ingredient for language maintenance. A sociolinguistic analysis of these forces reveals the complexity and the conflict involved in the choice of the written word. (Sociolinguistics, Louisiana French, Cajun, Louisiana French Creole, variation in writing, ethnography, literacy, language maintenance)

When individuals in the United States dial the emergency service telephone number, they immediately encounter some version of the English-language institutional opening “Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”. What happens, though, when the one placing the call is not a speaker of English? How do callers and call-takers adapt to overcome this added communicative barrier so that they are able to effectively assess the emergency situation at hand? The present study describes the structure of a language negotiation sequence, which serves to evaluate callers' entitlement to receive service in a language other than the institutional default—in our case, requests for Spanish in lieu of English. We illustrate both how callers initially design requests for language, as well as how call-takers subsequently respond to those differing request formulations. Interactions are examined qualitatively and quantitatively to underscore the context-based contingencies surrounding call-takers' preference for English over the use of translation services. The results prove informative not only in terms of how bilingual talk is organized within social institutions, but also more generally with regard to how humans make active use of a variety of resources in their attempts to engage in interaction with one another. (Entitlement, discourse/social interaction, conversation analysis, requests, language contact, institutional talk, Spanish (in the US))*

Braj Kachru, Asian Englishes: Beyond the canon. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005. Pp xxiv, 333. Pb. $27.95.>

Yamuna Kachru & Cecil Nelson, World Englishes in Asian contexts. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006. Pp. xxiv, 412. Pb. $32.50.

Rana Rubdy & Mario Saraceni (eds.) English in the world: Global rules, global roles. London: Continuum, 2006. 218 pp. Pb. £30.00.

With the growth of Asia's manufacturing and service industries, the prediction that China and India, respectively, will have the first and third largest global economies within 30 years, a population that comprises over 50% of the world's people, and massive English language programs throughout the region, it is no surprise that the role of English in Asia has become a major concern. At a recent (2006) Asia TEFL conference in Japan, the notions of Asian English(es), along with Asian methodologies and Asian knowledge, were topics of considerable discussion. The size and diversity of Asia, however, makes it a very difficult entity to define: The Asia TEFL conference included delegates from Israel and Iran, and two of the books under review here, Braj Kachru's Asian Englishes: Beyond the canon (AEBC) and Yamuna Kachru & Cecil Nelson's World Englishes in Asian contexts (WEAC), include (with identical maps) Australia and New Zealand. In some ways, the idea of Asia is defined by what it is not: Europe and North America. It is also not, of course, South America or Africa, though with WEAC containing a chapter on African Englishes (as well as African American Vernacular English, or AAVE), it seems as if they might be allowed in. It is clear nevertheless that various notions of Asia – as an economic zone, as a cultural entity, and as a user of a type or types of English – are widely used. We need to take the notion of Asia and Asian English(es) seriously, if only to try to understand what is meant by Braj Kachru's explanation that AEBC is “essentially about the Asianness in Asian Englishes and their gradual, yet marked, distinctiveness” (p. xv).

This work concerns structural outcomes of contact between Mexican Sign Language (LSM) and American Sign Language (ASL). A brief description of the social environment that leads to contact between LSM and ASL along the U.S.–Mexico border is provided, and two claims are advanced: (i) Contact between sign languages can exhibit characteristics of contact between spoken languages (e.g., interference), but there are also unique features of signed-language contact due to the ability to produce elements from a signed and spoken language simultaneously; and (ii) examples of interference from one sign language in the production of the other are sometimes systematic and predictable based on the signer's linguistic background, but cases of lack of interference also provide evidence that some signers are able to employ subtle articulatory differences, either consciously or not, when producing signs from the sign language that was learned after they acquired their first sign language.This work was supported by a National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders grant (F31 DC00352) to the author. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers and Barbara Johnstone for their comments on an earlier draft of this article, and Claire Ramsey and Sergio Peña provided input about the Mexican Deaf situation as well. Any errors are, of course, my own.

This article draws on data from an ethnographic project to explore the ways in which migrant micro-entrepreneurs exploit mobile messaging apps to co-construct mobile chronotopes: dynamic configurations of time and space negotiated by geographically separated participants, who draw on different contexts and frames of understanding. Analysis of mobile messages by two couples—Chinese butchers in Birmingham and Polish shop-owners in London—informed by interview and interactional data collected at work and home, suggests they discursively negotiate and exploit multiple chronotopic layers, creating complex intersections between virtual and physical spaces in everyday interactions. We focus on the role that multilingual and multimodal semiotic resources play in co-constructing mobile chronotopes. In particular, we explore critical junctures at which communicative expectations are challenged, rendering mobile chronotope negotiation visible. Our concept of the mobile chronotope has implications for both the theorisation of mobile phone communication and understanding how chronotopes function in contemporary transnational migrant discourse. (Chronotope, migrant entrepreneur, mobile messaging, transnational migration)*

Psycholinguistic attempts to model metaphor processing can be broadly classified as correspondence or class-inclusion in orientation. This article develops a framework for approaching metaphorical discourse by reconstructing these processing models as discourse types that are associated with particular activity types. In doing so, it treats these discourse types as particular strategies of recontextualization, where, depending on the discourse type being used, the metaphor source – and consequently, the status of the discourse itself as metaphorical – is either foregrounded or not. The second part of the article applies the framework to texts embedded in two different activity types: popular science texts which aim to explain technical concepts, and management texts which aim to provide management tips. The former, it is shown, uses the correspondence discourse type, while the latter uses the class-inclusion type.I would like to thank Desmond Allison, Jane Hill, Benny Lee, K. P. Mohanan, Rajendra Singh, Christopher Stroud, and two anonymous referees for valuable comments and suggestions. Special thanks to Lim Cherng Wren for inspiring this article. Needless to say, I alone am responsible for any errors that remain.

This article investigates the utility of Eckert & McConnell-Ginet's concept of “community of practice” for an analysis of the language used by women in a sexual assault tribunal. It is shown how the questions asked by two tribunal members (a male and a female faculty member), in a university sexual “harassment” tribunal, function to (re)frame and (re)construct the events in question as consensual sex. Although the female complainants (i.e. victims) in the tribunal characterize their experiences as sexual assault, two of the tribunal members – one of whom is a female faculty member – ask questions that presuppose the inadequacy and deficiency of the complainants' signals of resistance, suggesting that their so-called lack of resistance was tantamount to consent. Clearly, any homogeneous notion of “woman's speech style” or “woman's point of view” would fail to account for the differences between the discursive patterns of this woman tribunal member and the women complainants in this context. However, if (as argued by Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1992a,b) our linguistic practices arise out of the kinds of community of practice with which we are involved, then an understanding of such local practices and activities should provide greater insight into the differential linguistic behavior of the women involved in this sexual “harassment” tribunal.

This article addresses data that reside at the confluence of three types of linguistic “crossing” (Rampton 1995) among working-class French teens of predominantly Algerian descent. Strategically using the microphone of the researcher to imitate an elite French television show host, performers create indirect reported speech and direct stylized voicing for present peers and thereby mock them as show “guests.” Through analysis of such data, this article contributes to scholarship that extends and refines Goffman’s notions of footing and participation frameworks, and the relationships imaginable between them. It is argued that the notions of noncongruent voicing effects and generalized footing can lead to a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between language crossing and participation frameworks. More specifically, analyzing language crossing in terms of the resultant voicing effects sheds light upon the nuanced ways that speakers manage participation frameworks. (Register, crossing, footing, participation frameworks, voicing)

This article examines a genre of literary texts in early modern Spain written to be readable in both Latin and Spanish. These texts provide explicit evidence of a phenomenon called “strategic bivalency.” They exemplify both the ideological erasure of language boundaries by experts and the purposeful mobilization of bivalent elements that belong simultaneously to two languages in contact. It is argued that by using such bivalency strategically, speakers and writers in contact zones create the effect of using two languages at once, and that this can be a political act. The texts examined here were composed to demonstrate the superiority of the Spanish language and thus to support Spanish political preeminence. The article addresses the import of the Latin-Spanish bivalent genre for language ideology and considers its implications for understanding of modern bivalent practices and of languages as discrete systems.An earlier version of this article was presented in March 2005 at the International Symposium on Bilingualism 5, in Barcelona. Woolard is grateful to the Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia of Spain and to Joan Argenter, principal investigator, for partial support (grant #BFF2003-02954) of that presentation, as part of a project on “Codeswitching and culture in historical communities: Studies in historical linguistic ethnography.” Some of this material was also presented at the Joint XX Conference on Spanish in the U.S. and V Conference on Spanish in Contact with Other Languages, in Chicago, March 2005. Woolard thanks the organizers of these events for the opportunity to discuss these ideas. Archival and library research was supported in part by the New Del Amo Foundation through the University of California and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, which we gratefully acknowledge. Vincent Barletta and Monica Seefeldt assisted with bibliographic work. We are especially indebted to Roger Wright for helpful comments and sources. Thanks also to José del Valle, Narcís Figueras, Ricardo Otheguy, Barbara Johnstone, two anonymous reviewers, and a number of other scholars who kindly responded to queries. We are responsible for any errors and misconceptions that persist despite all this generous assistance.

This article analyses the ways in which stand-up comedy has been taken up by French comics of North and sub-Saharan African origins as a space of visibility and hearability. Following Bakhtin (1986), who argues that a genre reflects the social changes taking place in a society, I argue that such an appropriation should be considered as an important sociolinguistic fact that gives us privileged access to Hexagonal France's contemporary sociopolitical dynamics. I show that through their display of heteroglossic repertoires (viz. Maghrebi Arabic, several varieties of vernacular French, Hexagonal standard French, mesolectal African French, stylized chunks of English) comics challenge, at least symbolically, France's monoglot and highly centralized linguistic ideology. They also contribute to unsettling France's Republican model, which is marked by the institutional denial of the social and cultural diversity of the French population. The comics use heteroglossic resources to align with and disalign from multiple chronotopes associated with different social personae. From this emerges a new identity, urban, which both encompasses and transcends racial and ethnic categories. By contrast, I show that this identity is constructed through and received by the nonratified audience with ambivalence. (France, stand-up comedy, genre, urban, identity, chronotope, intertextuality.)*

Police-suspect interviews in England and Wales are a multi-audience, multi-purpose, transcontextual mode of discourse. They are conducted as part of the initial investigation into a crime, but are subsequently recontextualized through the judicial process, ultimately being presented in court as evidence against the interviewee. The communicative challenges posed by multiple future audiences are investigated by applying Bell's (1984) audience design model to the police interview, and the resulting “poor fit” demonstrates why this context is discursively counterintuitive to participants. Further, data analysis indicates that interviewer and interviewee, although ostensibly addressing each other, may orientate to different audiences, with potentially serious consequences. As well as providing new insight into police-suspect interview interaction, this article seeks to extend understanding of the influence of audience on interaction at the discourse level, and to contribute to the development of theoretical models for contexts with multiple or asynchronous audiences. (Audience design, audience orientation, police interviews, forensic linguistics)*

Departing from interactionally focused research on the “representations” (cf. “constructions”) of the “other,” including recent dynamic approaches to the sociolinguistics of style/styling, this article looks into the practice of talk about men that resonated in the conversations of four Greek adolescent female “best friends.” The discussion sheds light on the interactional resources that participants draw upon to refer to and identify or categorize men, their local meanings, and their consequentiality for gender identity constructions (in this case, both masculinities and femininities). It is shown that personae and social positions of men are drawn in the data by means of a set of resources (nicknames, character assessments, stylizations, membership categorization devices) that occur in, shape, and are shaped by story lines (intertextual and coconstructed stories that locate men in social place and time). It is also shown that the men talked about are predominantly marked for their gendered identities: Social styles that represent men as “soft” (“babyish,” “feminine”) or “tough” (“hard”) are those that are more routinely invoked. Each mobilizes specific resources (e.g. stylizations of the local dialect for “hard” men), but both are drawn playfully. The conclusion considers the implications of such discursive representations for the gender ideologies at work and the participants' own identity constructions and subjectivities.Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Birkbeck College Applied Linguistics seminars and at the 8th International Pragmatics Association Conference, Toronto, 2003. I am grateful to audiences there for their comments, to Nikolas Coupland for fiercely constructive criticism, to an anonymous reviewer for encouragement, and last but not least, to the sharp editorial eye of Jane Hill.

This article examines some issues facing the fieldworker attempting to observe and record “natural” conversations, and it reconsiders the long-held sociolinguistic notion of the observer's paradox by recasting it within Allan Bell's framework of audience design theory. Style shifting in observed and recorded speech events is seen to be influenced by speakers' perception of the fieldworker's social role, and by the fieldworker's participant role in the speech event.An earlier and much briefer version of this article was presented at the 2002 Berkeley Linguistics Society conference. I am most grateful to Barbara Johnstone, Jane Hill, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments. Funding for this fieldwork was provided by grants from the International Research and Exchange Board, the Academy for Educational Development, and the Berkeley Program in Post-Soviet Studies.

Most studies of sound change in the United States have focused on the social strata of urban societies. In the American cornbelt, however, the most important social distinctions are horizontal rather than vertical. A fundamental ethnic division dating back to original settlement of the area opposes town and countryside dwellers. A study of fifty-one speakers in a rural area of Illinois shows fronting and raising of (aw) to be considerably more advanced among countryside dwellers than among town residents. Furthermore, the countryside population underwent a profound social and economic change during the past half century as large numbers of subsistence farmers abandoned the land and rural life altogether, leaving behind a smaller number of farmers whose larger operations meant that the economic and social status of the average farmer considerably improved. An examination of town and countryside age groups from the data base shows that an increase in the fronting and raising of (aw) took place primarily in a single generation most affected by the change in the farm population. At least temporarily, fronted and raised (aw), despite an overt nonstandard status documented in more than a century of speech and language textbooks, suddenly acquired a new prestige – spreading even to town populations – along with a reassertion of rural values and rural life. (Sound change, social structure, rural society, American English, sociolinguistics, dialectology)

This study relates to two strands of research into children's communicative competence: the study of children's conflict behavior and the study of ritualized communicative activities through which children construct, maintain, and strategically negotiate their social world (e.g., Brenneis & Lein 19p; Lein & Brenneis 1978; Boggs 1978; Corsaro 1979; Morgan, O'Neill, & Harre 1979; Goodwin, 1980). A number of ethnographic studies have been specifically concerned with the analysis of culturally situated, ritualized, agonistic events. Notably, the series of studies concerned with the language form known as “sounding” or “playing the dozens” among black American youth in the United States (e.g., Abrahams 1962; Kochman 1972, 1981; Labov 1972; Mitchell-Kernan 1972), the study of verbal dueling among Turkish boys (Dundes, Leach, & Ozkok 1972), or the study of ritualized fighting among the Irish men of Tory Island (Fox 1977).

Maintenance of dialect differences despite loss of communicative isolation points up the need to analyze the role of dialect-standard alternates in signalling social identity and in contributing to conversational inference. Such analysis should focus on conversational interaction and on the processes by which situated interpretations are arrived at and used as frames for interpreting what follows. An Afro-American sermon and a disputed speech by a Black political leader to a mixed audience are analyzed. Dialect alternants serve to signal switching between contrasting styles in both. In the sermon, the audience shares with the speaker a knowledge of the structure of the activity and of the rules for both styles. In the speech, the activity lacks a predictable structure, only the style can frame interpretation, and most of the audience do not share its rules. Conversational inference is shown to depend not only on grammar, lexical meanings and conversational principles, but also on constellations of speech variants, rhythm, and prosody. Such constellations may persist as symbols of shared cultural background. (Dialectology, conversational and discourse analysis; Afro-American speech styles; urban United States.)

A framing analysis of family interaction during dinnertime demonstrates that the mother and father linguistically create gendered identities through the number and types of discursive positions they take up within the frames they create and maintain. The mother accomplishes numerous tasks and activities by taking up multiple discursive positions within several interactional frames, whereas the father takes up fewer positions within fewer frames. Furthermore, the positions they take up are gendered, reflecting a sex-based division of labor, even though both parents work full-time outside the home. Through these gendered patterns of participation, the parents create gendered parental identities and negotiate their parental authority with their daughter and with each other. The attention to speech acts, footings, positioning, and framing reveals the intricate and dynamic details of interaction. Furthermore, this discourse model captures and explicates the process through which individuals create gendered identities as they enact and constitute other social identities.

Despite extensive research over the past four decades, a number of issues concerning the historical and current development of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) remain unresolved. This study utilizes a unique sociolinguistic situation – a long-standing, isolated, biracial community situated in a distinctive dialect region of coastal North Carolina – to address questions of localized dialect accommodation and ethnolinguistic distinctiveness in earlier African American English. A comparison of diagnostic phonological and morphosyntactic variables for a sample of four different generations of African Americans and a baseline European American group shows that considerable accommodation of the localized dialect occurred in earlier African American speech. Nonetheless, certain dialect features – e.g., copula absence and 3rd person verbal s marking – were distinctively maintained by African Americans in the face of localized dialect accommodation; and this suggests long-term ethnolinguistic distinctiveness. Cross-generational change among African Americans indicates that younger speakers are moving away from the localized Pamlico Sound dialect toward a more generalized AAVE norm. Contact-based and identity-based explanations are offered for the current trend of localized dialect displacement.