Ken Hyland, Metadiscourse: Exploring interaction in writing. London & New York: Continuum. 2005. Pp. x, 230. Hb £75.00, Pb £25.00.

Metadiscourse is increasingly recognized as fundamental to the way in which writers construct text to achieve their communicative goals, but it remains a somewhat vague concept in certain respects, and the term is used in different ways by different scholars; so a full-scale treatment of the phenomenon is potentially of great interest. Ken Hyland has published a number of articles in recent years on metadiscourse, and he is clearly well placed to write this survey of the topic, designed, according to the blurb, as an “accessible introduction” for students of applied linguistics and teachers, as well as academics. The book is divided into three main parts: The first reviews previous attempts to define metadiscourse and proposes a revised definition and classification; the second, and longest, explores the functions of metadiscourse in a range of different types of text; and the third focuses specifically on the language classroom and suggests ways in which students can be encouraged to improve their command of metadiscourse.

This article demonstrates how the field of Jewish interlinguistics and a case study of Jewish Russian (JR) can contribute to the general understanding of ethnolects. JR is a cluster of post-Yiddish varieties of Russian used as a special in-group register by Ashkenazic Jews in Russia. Differences between varieties of JR may be explained in terms of differing degrees of copying from Yiddish. The case of JR allows the general conclusions that (i) the diffusion of ethnolectal features into mainstream use is facilitated not only by a dense social network but also by a relatively sufficient number of speakers with a variety of occupations; and (ii) in addition to matrix language turnover and lexical and prosodic features, an ethnolect may be characterized by new combinability rules under which stems and derivational suffixes belong to the target language (here Russian) but their combination patterns do not.

This article takes an ethnographic approach to language standardisation. My research focuses on Romani language use in Prizren, Kosovo, which has a tradition of multilingualism. Moving away from approaches to standardisation that focus only on linguistic processes, I look more broadly at the social processes behind language standardisation. I explore discussions, debates, and attitudes towards me as a language learner to show how a Romani standard is being produced and legitimised in Prizren. Applying theories of purism and standardisation, I examine how certain speech practices are made inferior and how social hierarchies legitimise this. I relate this more broadly to the politics of Romani language and to theories of sociolinguistics and anthropological linguistics. (Romani, Kosovo, standardisation, purism, language ideology)*

This article is concerned with understanding and analyzing the role of the individual in Navajo poetry performances, in particular, three performances of putatively the same poem by the Navajo poet Laura Tohe. One performance is the written orthographic poem, and the other two are oral performances that have been recorded and analyzed. It is argued that a focus on the individual performer and on multiple performances can provide insight into the relationship between social constructions of self and identity within the constraints and opportunities particular media and contexts provide. It also reveals the importance of studying individual creativity in language and culture research.I would like to thank Andy Hofling, Barbara Johnstone, David Samuels, and Laura Tohe for comments on various versions of this article. Jonathan Hill, as usual, has been a sounding board for many of the ideas that finally found their way into this article. Thanks also to Jane Adams for some useful advice at a critical moment. I also want to thank Elizabeth Keating, Scott Rushforth, Joel Sherzer, Pauline Turner Strong, and Anthony Woodbury for comments on a much earlier draft. The research for this study was made possible by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the University of Texas at Austin. I want to thank the Navajo Nation for granting me a permit to do research on the emergence of poetry on the Navajo Nation. Thanks also to Leighton Peterson for his help during fieldwork. I also want to thank all the Navajo poets who allowed me to record and interview them. I further want to thank the various people of the Navajo Nation who in one way or another aided in my research. Views expressed in this article are my responsibility, as are any mistakes that remain.

This study is a sociophonetic investigation of dialect variation and change in the East African Asian community in Leicester, UK. The community differs from other strands of the British Asian diaspora because of its migration history: a two-stage journey (‘twice migration’) within a few generations, first from the Indian subcontinent to East Africa (late nineteenth century) and from there onward to Britain (early 1970s). We examine variation in the production of the foot, strut, and nurse vowels across two generations of East African Asian migrants with a focus on the usage of originally Indian English features, identity expression, changing sense of belonging, and desire to maintain the original culture from the East African homelands. Our sociolinguistic examination of the speakers’ migration history demonstrates that, despite a strong affiliation with East Africa, first-generation speakers have predominantly maintained Indian English patterns whereas second-generation subjects partake in accommodation to an (educated) variety of East Midlands English. (Twice migration, accommodation, identity, variation and change in the diaspora, foot, strut, and nurse vowels, Indian English, East African English, East Midlands English)*

The structure and function of a sociolinguistic interview sets up a context that affords informants the opportunity to achieve their own goals. We examine how an informant manipulates the reception format of the speech event, using embedded orientation to characterize information as alternately given or new, and the interviewer consequently as an insider or outsider. Whereas previous analyses have examined how embedded orientation highlights or sheds light on information in complicating action clauses, we posit that the content of embedded orientation clauses is important in and of itself. Rather than serving as simply background information, embedded orientation can do important ideological work. In the case here, embedded orientation introduces into the narrative traces of a local story—the history of local Fascism, a topic that is rarely discussed in the teller's community. (Embedded orientation, narrative, sociolinguistic interview)

This article describes discursive processes by which inhabitants of the Congolese border town Goma attribute new indexical values to Lingala, a language exogenous to the area of which most Goma inhabitants only possess limited knowledge. This creative reconfiguration of indexicalities results in the emergence of three “indexicalities of the second order”: the indexing of (i) being a true Congolese, (ii) toughness (based on Lingala's association with the military), and (iii) urban sophistication (based on its association with the capital Kinshasa). While the last two second-order reinterpretations are also widespread in other parts of the Congolese territory, the first one, resulting in the emergence of a Lingala as an “indexical icon” of a corresponding “language community,” deeply reflects local circumstances and concerns, in particular the sociopolitical volatility of the Rwandan-Congolese borderland that renders publicly affirming one's status as an “autochthonous” Congolese pivotal for assuring a livelihood and at times even personal security. (Lingala, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Goma, orders of indexicality, language community, autochthony, Kiswahili)*

This study provides a linguistic perspective on the structure and the interpretation of a key historical narrative in Umpithamu (a Pama-Nyungan language of Cape York Peninsula, Australia), against the background of a larger corpus of narrative texts in Umpithamu. The analysis focuses on the role of participant tracking devices in the macro-structure of the narrative, and the role of case marking in the build-up of narrative motifs. It is argued not only that marked types of participant tracking serve to mark the boundaries of episodes, as often noted in the literature, but also that some types have additional functions within episodes, which leads to a proposal for refinement of Fox's (1987) Principle of Morphosyntactic Markedness. On a micro-structural level, it is shown how a rare system of case marking is used by the narrator to construe white–Aboriginal interactions as events in which the Aboriginal participants experience an extreme lack of control.The first author would like to thank Mrs. Florrie Bassani and Ms. Joan Liddy, who so patiently taught him about their language, their life, and their history, and Bruce Rigsby, who introduced him to the Lamalama people and generously shared his earlier recordings of Umpithamu and his vast knowledge of Princess Charlotte Bay languages. Fieldwork on Umpithamu was sponsored by the Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders, which funded two research stays at the University of Melbourne, and the Australian Department of Communication, IT and the Arts (DCITA), which funded another fieldtrip. Many thanks to Nick Evans and the Department of Linguistics in Melbourne for hosting the first author's stays, and to Clair Hill for organizing the DCITA grant. A previous version of this article was presented at the 2nd European Workshop on Australian Aboriginal Languages in Somlószőlős, and at a workshop on Australian Aboriginal Narrative at the Max Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik. We would like to thank the members of the audience, especially Nick Enfield, Nick Evans, Clair Hill, Judit Horváth, Danièle Klapproth, Stephen Levinson, Bill McGregor, Adam Saulwick, Gunter Senft, Peter Sutton, and Michael Walsh, for very useful comments. We are also grateful to the reviewers and the editor for very detailed comments on a previous version.

This article analyzes seven Japanese all-male friendly conversations, focusing on stereotypically gendered sentence-final particles to ascertain whether and how Japanese men native to the Kansai (western) region of Japan, aged 19–68 years, use these features to create a gendered identity. Quantitative methods are employed to establish the frequency with which such stereotypically gendered forms are used. A close discourse analysis investigates how the men use these forms in particular contexts to index particular identities, which may or may not correspond to traditional notions of Japanese masculinity.Earlier versions of this article were presented to the Department of Anthropology at the University of Iowa and to the Stanford Sociolinguistics Research Group at Stanford University. I thank the members of those audiences for their vital feedback. I am indebted to Janet S. (Shibamoto) Smith, Michael Silverstein, Miyako Inoue, Shigeko Okamoto, Laura Graham, Scott Fabius Kiesling, Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, Hari Kanta Ogren, Jane Hill, and an anonymous reviewer for carefully reading and commenting on drafts. Without the support of the Kobe College Corporation and the National Science Foundation (Grant # BCS9817943) this article and its larger project would not have been possible.

The study of iconic properties of language has been marginalized in linguistics, with the assumption that iconicity, linked with expressivity, is external to the grammar. Yet iconicity plays an essential role in sociolinguistic variation. At a basic level, repetition and phonetic intensification can intensify the indexicality of variables. Iconicity plays a further role in variation in the form of sound symbolism, linking properties of sounds with attributes or objects. Production studies have shown some phonological variables exhibiting sound symbolism, particularly in the expression of affect. In some cases, the observation of sound symbolism has been largely interpretive. But in others, stylistic variability as a function of speaker affect has provided empirical evidence of iconicity. This article examines the role of iconicity and performativity in transcending the limits of reference, reviews iconicity in production studies, and provides experimental evidence that sound symbolism influences how listeners attribute affect to linguistic variation. (Variation, iconicity, affect)

While interest in affective processes has led to an affective turn in cultural studies, in sociolinguistics this perspective has been given less attention. This study takes up the ‘lens of affect’ and directs it on two cases exemplifying the circulation of minoritised languages in new media spaces: music video covers from two minority-language contexts, Irish and Sámi, uploaded on YouTube. Combining recent theorising on affect with insights from sociolinguistic research, the study investigates how the YouTube users’ affective investments contribute to a (re)evaluation of the two minoritised languages, their speakers, and the related ethnic/national belongings, and how these investments are expressions of more or less banal nationalism, connected to the colonial histories of Ireland and Finland. The study illustrates how the social media operate as a catalyst of affective investments involved in an ethnolinguistic (re)ordering of languages and their speakers, at the intersection of ‘banal globalisation’ and ‘everyday nationalism’. (Minority languages, affect, discourse, social media, nationalism)*

In this article we consider the discursive production of status as it relates to democratic ideals of environmental equity and community responsibility, orienting specifically to food discourse and ‘elite authenticity’ (Mapes 2018), as well as to recent work concerning normativity and class inequality (e.g. Thurlow 2016; Hall, Levon, & Milani 2019). Utilizing a dataset comprised of 150 Instagram posts, drawn from three different acclaimed chefs’ personal accounts, we examine the ways in which these celebrities emphasize local/sustainable food practices while simultaneously asserting their claims to privileged eating. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, we document three general discursive tactics: (i) plant-based emphasis, (ii) local/community terroir, and (iii) realities of meat consumption. Ultimately, we establish how the chefs’ claims to egalitarian/environmental ideals paradoxically diminish their eliteness, while simultaneously elevating their social prestige, pointing to the often complicated and covert ways in which class inequality permeates the social landscape of contemporary eating. (Food discourse, elite authenticity, normativity, social class, locality/sustainability)*

Psychopathological explanations oversimplify religious glossolalia. An analysis of the use of glossolalia reveals that the speaker manipulates linguistic variables with considerable delicacy in response to role, purpose of the speech act, and setting of the speech act. Examined from a cultural point of view, glossolalia is another ‘language’ in the Pentecostalists' linguistic repertoire. (Glossolalia, Pentecostalism, speech pathologies, paralinguistics, language of religion.)

The sociolinguistic survey of Cayo District, British Honduras, is planned as one of a series to be carried out by the same methods and as far as possible by the same team, so that comparable results can be obtained from a number of territories, and hypotheses about the relationship between patterns of verbal behaviour and other social factors based on one territory tested in the next. The hypotheses to be tested were formed (somewhat pretentiously) within a general ‘law’ with four riders in ‘Problems of description in multilingual communities’ (Le Page 1968a), and the practical ends of the survey also adumbrated there — viz., to help improve the quality of education in multilingual communities by illuminating the problems, the motives and the performance of children, by training the teachers and by helping in a basic way with the preparation of materials. The scientific aims are to gain an understanding of linguistic processes in relation to other relevant factors and modes of behaviour, so as to improve both linguistic and sociolinguistic theory.

Literature on language death offers abundant information on the grammatical, phonological, lexical, and sociolinguistic processes that a dying speech form can undergo. However, work remains to be done in the area of narrative skills and performance. This article examines the creative manipulation of certain narrative devices, including bilingual lexical resources from modern Greek and Tosk Albanian in stories offered by a residual group of fluent Albanian speakers in Greece. In a community, which is highly variable from the point of view of the allocation of its Arvanítika (Albanian) linguistic and sociolinguistic skills to various population segments, fluent speakers manage to achieve a significant performance breakthrough by foregrounding and evaluating information important for their attitude building and vital to their social existence. Narrative performances become ways of relating historical events and past experiences in present-day life. The article makes the point that in studies of language death a more intensive use of the ethnography of speaking paradigm can be of great value for the detection of sensitive areas of speech behavior and change. (Narrative performance, language death, ethnography of speaking, Balkan sociolinguistics, Tosk Albanian, Greek)

St. Barthélemy, a small island in the northeastern Caribbean, is populated primarily by descendants of 17th century French settlers, and hosts seven language varieties. To explain the linguistic complexity of the island, this article reconstructs both its social history (using censuses, church records, and land registries) and its economic history, analyzing the effects of economic change on the island's population. The two offshoot communities on St. Thomas provide evidence of social fragmentation related to occupational differences. Functional explanations for St. Barth's linguistic diversity are inadequate; however, the social network theory of Milroy & Milroy 1992 proves useful in explaining the persistence of language differences in this small isolated community. (Social networks, life-modes, economic change, societal multilingualism, creole languages, French, West Indies, St. Barthélemy)

The conservatism of modern Icelandic is a bromide so well worn that it is refreshing now and then to be reminded that Icelandic has in fact changed from that Old Norwegian which the settlers brought with them in the ninth century, and that it is not, in the words of a recent writer, ‘eine versteinerte Sprachform’ (Décsy 1973: 48). One striking change, which involves phonological, morphological, syntactic, and sociolinguistic problems, is that of the dual and plural pronouns of the first and second persons. Succinctly stated: ON vit ‘we’ dual and pit ‘you’ dual have become við ‘we’ plural and pið ‘you’ plural, while ON vér ‘we’ plural and pér ‘you’ plural have become ‘we’ honorific and ‘you’ honorific. A systematic shift of meaning has affected both pronouns, eliminating the dual meaning in favor of the plural, and the plural in favor of the honorific singular.

This article presents a typology of phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical features illustrative of factors conditioning the usage of speakers and writers of Revived Manx, including substratal influence from English; language ideologies prevalent within the revival movement, especially forms of linguistic purism; and language-specific features of Manx and its orthography. Evidence is taken primarily from a corpus of Revived Manx speech and writing. The observed features of Revived Manx are situated within Zuckermann's (2009, 2020) framework of ‘hybridization’ and ‘revival linguistics’, which takes Israeli Hebrew as the prototypical model of revernacularization of a non-L1 language. However, Manx arguably provides a more typical example of what to expect when a revived minority language remains predominantly an L2 for an indefinite period, with each new cohort of speakers able to reshape the target variety in the absence of a firmly established L1 norm. (Manx, Celtic, language revival, language ideology, language shift, language contact)*

This study investigates the diffusion and structural adaptation of quotative be like into a rural African American speech community. The data come from a longitudinal corpus of recordings (1988–2010) with rural African American Vernacular English (AAVE) speakers born between 1894–2002. Previous research suggests other innovative AAVE features have diffused into this community from neighboring urban areas (Cukor-Avila 1995, 2001; Cukor-Avila & Bailey 1995b, 1996) approximately a generation after they appear in urban varieties. The present analysis supports Cukor-Avila (2002) that be like has followed a similar path of diffusion, and adds new recordings of young speakers to provide necessary data to explore the transmission of be like in the community, its continued diffusion, and how these processes reinforce each other as be like becomes the primary means of expressing quoted speech. In addition, the present study explores how quotative be like has been structurally adapted into the AAVE copula system. (AAVE, transmission, diffusion, adaptation, quotative be like)*