Christian churches are central to modern social and political organization in the Pacific islands, yet little research has been conducted on their role in intrasocietal diversity in language attitudes and use. We examine church affiliation and its impact on language use, identity, and change among Kwara'ae speakers in the Solomon Islands, where intense competition for converts and the association of particular churches with modernization and development is having a significant impact on language choice and change. We show that members of different sects signal their separate identities not only through linguistic code but also through discourse patterns and nonverbal aspects of communication. The characteristics we identify are illustrated in transcripts from four speakers, and the social outcomes of these characteristics is discussed. (Ethnography of speaking, discourse analysis, nonverbal communication, language change, language attitudes, Melanesia, Solomon Islands)

Based on evidence from a French-Wolof phrase book published in Senegal in 1864, this article makes the case that urban Wolof, a variety of the language characterized by significant lexical borrowing from French, is a much older variety than scholars have generally claimed. Historical evidence suggests that urban Wolof emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries in the coastal island city of Saint-Louis du Sénégal, France's earliest African settlement and future capital of the colonial entity that would be known as French West Africa. The intimate nature of early contact between African and European populations and the later role played by the métis or mixed-race population of the island as linguistic brokers contributed to a unique, urban variety of Wolof that has important links to today's variety of urban Wolof spoken in Dakar and other cities throughout the country.

There is much that any sociolinguist would agree with in Peter Trudgill's essay. It is written in his usual lucid style, and supported by a wealth of detail, reflecting his extensive knowledge, research, and scholarly expertise. However, it is stimulatingly provocative on the issue of why particular variants win out in dialect contact situations. Our response falls into two sections: (i) the identity issue, and (ii) the New Zealand situation.

Gumperz (1976) claims that the direction of a code-switch provides important clues regarding the intended illocutionary force of an utterance and that oppositions like warning/personal appeal and casual remark/personal statement can be seen as metaphoric extensions of the we/they code opposition. “What at the societal level,” he observes, “are seen as norms of language usage or symbolic affirmations of ethnic boundaries are transformed here and built upon in conversation to affect the interpretation of speakers' intent and determine effectiveness in communication” (39–40). His hypothesis was corroborated by his Hindi-English bilingual speakers who felt that whereas a shift to the “they” code (English) suggested more of a threat, a shift to the “we” code (Hindi) signified more of a personal appeal. Code choice, according to Gumperz, is a device that determines the interpretation of an utterance (at least as far as its illocutionary force is concerned).

While the notion of hegemonic masculinity has received a lot of attention in recent scholarship, hegemonic femininity remains largely underdeveloped. We aim to address this gap by illustrating the benefits of using the concept of hegemonic femininities in sociolinguistic scholarship. Conducting a case study on the discourse of trailing spouses in Hong Kong, we analyse hegemonic femininities at the local, regional, and global level and explore how they are interlinked with each other. Findings show how these trailing spouses often challenge and reject hegemonic femininities on the local level, but largely accept and reinforce them on the regional and global level. The specific femininities that are considered to be hegemonic are highly context-dependent, and, unlike masculinities, the hegemony of femininities is a matter of internal degree—that is, certain femininities take hegemonic status compared to other femininities but do not take a dominant position in the gender order. (Hegemonic femininities, hegemonic masculinities, trailing spouses, Hong Kong, gender order)*

Referential practice – the variety of ways in and through which speakers refer to things in social interaction – involves a range of very different methods. When referring to physical objects or processes in face-to-face interaction, people may choose from a variety of resources, including verbal categories, names, pointing, verbal descriptors, depictive gestures, and prop demonstrations. This raises the question: Under what circumstances do speakers choose particular resources over others? To address this question, this study examines referential practice in a particular kind of face-to-face workplace setting, the service counter of a quick print shop. At the service counter, not only do customers use alternative resources in referring to the document services they want, but these resources appear to be ordered relative to one another in terms of a preference for minimization. In referring to document services, customers first try the most minimal form, the official name, but if that fails or is unknown, customers fall back on more expanded forms of reference, such as pointing or depicting.

This article explores the interconnection between grammar and the performance of preferred and dispreferred responses in Japanese. As is well known, dispreferred format turns are structurally more complex than preferred format turns, regularly delayed, accompanied by prefaces and accounts, mitigated, or made indirect. Owing to the flexibility of Japanese grammar, participants have expanded intra-turn capacity to maximize or minimize compliance with such formats. On one extreme, a dispreferred action can be massively delayed until near the turn-ending through opting for so-called canonical predicate-final word order and minimization of ellipsis. On the other extreme, a preferred action can be expedited to the very opening of a turn through non-canonical predicate-initial word order by taking advantage of word order variability and ellipsis. Such syntactic practices are interactionally managed for calibrating the timing of social action. It emerges that the canonical word order – assumed to be the generically unmarked alternative – is actually optimally tailored for the implementation of marked (dispreferred) responses, as opposed to a non-canonical word order for unmarked (preferred) responses, in the given sequential environment.

More than 13,000 scientists from the former Soviet Union have arrived in Israel since 1988. The purpose of this study is to analyze certain factors that influence immigrant scientists' integration into the society and academic community of Israel, with special attention to multilingual identity. Previous studies in this field emphasize the significance of Hebrew and juxtaposed Russian with Hebrew; however, in Israel, especially in the educated classes, English is an important status symbol and boundary marker. The data demonstrate that English is crucial in shaping the patterns of immigrants\' social integration. Results of statistical tests demonstrate significant differences between those who studied English and those who studied either German or French regarding feelings of personal self-actualization and job satisfaction. Moreover, command of English proved to be the determining factor for risk of losing a job. The implication is that Israeli language policy, which has traditionally taken the acquisition of Hebrew by immigrants as its major goal, should be reformulated to include access to English instruction, since without it they are unlikely to become equal members of the Israeli middle class.

This study investigates the construction of political identity in the 2011–2012 US Republican presidential primary debates. Focusing on candidates’ self-introductions, I analyze how candidates use references to family members and roles to frame their political identities or ‘presidential selves’. Family references are shown to (i) frame candidates’ personal identities as family men/women; (ii) interweave the spheres of home and politics and consequently, their private and public selves; (iii) serve as a tool of discursive one-upmanship in self-introduction sequences; and (iv) demonstrate intimate familiarity and expertise on the topic of national security. This study extends research on family discourse and identity by examining the rhetorical function of mentioning family-related identities in explicitly persuasive public discourse, and contributes to sociolinguistic research on political discourse by examining how family identities serve as a resource for framing political identities. (Discourse analysis, framing, family, identity, political discourse, presidential debates, sequentiality)

Detailed analysis of transcripts is a time-honored practice among linguistic ethnographers. In contemporary research, however, interactions among global forces distant from ethnographic sites are critical for analysis and explanation, as is the fact that multiple sites must be covered. Ethnographers' interests, pragmatic relevance, and personal deixis militate against the ability of site-specific talk to serve as raw material for construction of the representations of those distant global forces. In this article, local discourse, as manifested in ethnographic oral-history interviews, is viewed first as a test of the impact of those global forces. Second, the talk is a construction that can be explained in terms of those forces' linkage with global representations. Finally, the concept “fractal” is suggested as a possible way to show such links.NOTE: Support by NIH/NIDA grant no. DA-10736 is gratefully acknowledged.

Theoretical and applied research in the field of institutional discourse analysis calls for an increasing awareness of the constitutive nature of discourse in the representation and the assessment of social identities (Sarangi & Roberts 1999; Blommaert 2010; Eades 2010). The staunchly textualist accounts surviving institutional practice, however, tend to obscure complex multidiscursive and language ideologically anchored processes that mold procedural outcomes. On the basis of first-hand ethnographic data collected across legal-administrative procedures in Belgium, this article aims at revealing some meaningful contexts that have been erased in the case of an asylum seeker who became a murder victim and whose asylum file was used in the assize trial as a resource to sketch his social identity. The analysis explores the ideological functioning of textuality in the situated details of communicative practice, thereby aiming for a better understanding of the intricacies of multidiscursive identity construction in translocal procedural settings. (Institutional discourse analysis, multidiscursivity, language ideology and identity, sociolinguistic mobility, asylum procedure, assize court procedure)*

Through the use of data collected among Slave Indians living in northern Canada, this paper explores a problem in ethnographic methodology: how to describe cultural rules such that contextual restrictions which operate upon them are identified and made explicit. Following a discussion of some of the ways in which the aims and assumptions of current sociolinguistic theory can be applied to this problem, a formal model is presented of Slave rules for travelling on the ice of frozen lakes and rivers. This model, which specifies the conditions under which a Slave hunter can be expected to cross an expanse of ice or avoid it, reveals the sensitivity of normative rules to variation in contextual features and illustrates both the value and feasibility of incorporating these features into ethnographic accounts. (Ethnographic methodology, sociolinguistics, formal analysis, Canadian Indians, language and environment.)

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, when pidginized Sango became the vehicular language of the Ubangi River basin, colonization by the French and Belgians was accomplished with little direct linguistic contact between the whites and the indigenous populations but with great rellance on the real or assumed linguistic skills of their foreign African personnel. The whites' use of African languages was limited with respect to the referentlal function but powerful with respect to the expressive or affective. (Colonization, Africa, Sango, pidginization, ethnography of communication)

In this article I challenge the notion that interviews are artificial speech events, by comparing how one participant told stories in a sociolinguistic interview and again in a subsequent spontaneous conversation. As shown by qualitative and quantitative comparison of speaker-role inhabitance (Koven 2002, 2007), I show that the interview stories are no less involved (Tannen 1989), and are actually more interlocutory than the conversational stories. With these comparative materials, I demonstrate how interviews may be contexts in which people (re)tell experiences that they may also tell in “naturally occurring” contexts. (Narrative, interviews, footing, retellings)

The American performance artist Lady Gaga has earned great notoriety in the mainstream media through artistic and personal performance, as well as for her relationships both with her fandom and the media. In this article, I discuss the linguistic stance-taking moves that Lady Gaga uses in two different communicative media in order to construct an authentic celebrity persona. Through references to intimate relationships, inclusive plural pronouns, and demonstration of attention to fan conversations, Lady Gaga's Twitter posts create a stance of alignment with the ‘ordinary’ people in her fan base. Conversely, by using combative and corrective rhetorical strategies in interviews with journalists, she creates a stance of disalignment with mass media establishment. Together, these linguistic strategies allow Lady Gaga's claims to authenticity to be seen as morally credible. This work highlights the central role that language plays in constructing an authentic-seeming public persona. (Authenticity, stance, celebrity, Lady Gaga, media, interview, Twitter)*

This article explores the persistence of Tamil-English bilingualism in the Marxist/Nationalist de-facto separate state of Jaffna (Sri Lanka) through an integrated macro- and micro-sociolinguistic analysis of code choice in the community. While Tamil is dominant at present, the international hegemony of English is nevertheless subtly felt. There are now few L2 dominant or balanced bilinguals; grammatical competence in “standard English” is declining; Tamil has taken over many conventionally English domains; extensive use of unmixed English is reduced to a few formal contexts; and political pressure proscribes English. However, through code-switching activity, English continues to be used in a more pervasive form than ever before, in conventional and unconventional contexts, with complex communicative competence. Code-switching helps reconcile the socio-psychological conflicts of the community and assures the continuity of bilingualism (defying prophecies of English death), with the possibility of an Englishized Tamil becoming an independent code. (Bilingualism, code-switching, English, language choice)

There is strong evidence that legacies of Apartheid remain in place in South Africa's education system, entangling economic inequality, racial categorization, and de facto language hierarchy. This study draws from an ethnographic study of language diversity in a Cape Town public school, focusing on how classroom practices regulate and school staff frame language diversity and social inequality among their pupils. It uses the concepts of language register, sociolinguistic scale, and racialization to analyze how education policy, classroom practices, and school discourses about language in South Africa implicate class and racial hierarchies. It shows how register analysis reveals multi-scaled connections between linguistic and social inequality. (Language registers, education, social inequality, South Africa)*

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)*

In this article we explore the relationship between authentication and identification in the spontaneous hip-hop talk of four young London men from multi-ethnic working-class backgrounds. Whereas sociolinguistic studies of authentication and/or hip hop have frequently focused on the linguistic style of hip hoppers, this article explores hip-hop talk with a specific interest in ‘cultural concepts’ (Silverstein 2004). This focus allows us to discuss how the young men authenticate themselves in relation to a range of other identity performances they discuss, including the ‘white posh girl's’ appropriation of ‘world star’ hip-hop culture or the local South London gang's display of violent gangsta personas. These cultural concepts not only index various aspects of hip-hop culture but also need to be understood in relation to various aspects of larger-scale discourses, practices, and structures. (Hip hop, authentication, indexicalities, cultural concepts)*

Trudgill argues cogently against identity and in favor of automaticity as the primary basis for accommodation in koine formation. I agree with the general thrust of his arguments, and below offer qualifications and evidence that support them, but I also present caveats and alternative views, particularly with regard to the ordering relations between identity (or identity formation) and accommodation.