Peter Trudgill's account of new-dialect formation is uniformitarian, a position I have embraced explicitly since Mufwene 2001. In Mufwene 2006, I show how similar the mechanisms involved are to those that account for the emergence of creoles, the basic difference lying in the composition of the contact setting's feature pool (see also below). The position I defend is even less moderate, as I argue that in the history of humankind language speciation has basically been a consequence of how internal variation within a language has been affected by migrations of its speakers and additionally by the different contacts the relevant populations have had among themselves (Trudgill's position) and with speakers of other languages in their new, colonial ecologies (Mufwene 2005, 2007, 2008). The reader should not be surprised to see in this response comments that are primarily intended to support and complement the position of the target article.

This article investigates linguistic diversity, migration, and labour in the case of a nineteenth-century copper mine in the multilingual northern periphery of Norway. Taking a historical perspective on workplace multilingualism, it reveals the dynamic relationships between the economic interests and policy-making of an industrial enterprise and the political and sociolinguistic development in a multilingual region, at a time when national authorities introduced assimilation policies. Owned and managed by British industrialists, the mine recruited almost exclusively migrant workers to a remote fjord in the Norwegian periphery, many of them Kven from northern Finland and Sweden. In a multi-layered approach, the study sketches multilingual work practices, policy-making, and the discursive positioning of diversity, and explores the company's management of the relationships between capital, community, and nation-state. It reveals the company's flexible approach towards diversity governed by economic interest. (Workplace multilingualism, mining, Kven, Norway, historical)*

This paper describes the functions of a verbal derivational suffix found in the Ngayarda languages Panyjima, Martuthunira, Yinyjiparnti, and Kurrama. This suffix, which appears at first blush to be an essentially syntactic device very like the reciprocal suffix found in other Australian languages, may be used to indicate the existence of a particular kin relationship between participants involved in the action described by a verb. The paper presents firstly the more general functions of the suffix in the Ngayarda languages and then discusses the use of the suffix to mark kin relationships. It is argued that the general “collective activity” meaning of the suffix has generalised to the marking of certain kin relationships through the recognition that collective activity is a feature of these particular relationships. The successful analysis of the data thus relies on a knowledge of the social uses to which utterances involving the suffix are put. (Anthropological linguistics, sociolinguistics, syntactic theory, cultural anthropology, Australian linguistics)

This paper examines language in a factory setting and shows that: (1) within a single building, different terms for the same thing may be found; (2) such alternation may be sufficiently stable to appear on ‘official’ forms, such as orders and inventories; (3) the major boundary is spatial, not social, in that it has to do with the major boundary between types of work; (4) operational links, proximity, and mobility between departments are major determinants of agreement and difference in usage within and across the two main sections of the factory. The data show lexical variability at a finer scale than has usually been considered in American dialectology, and show variation that appears independent of both region and class in its patterning. The data indicate a need for further investigation into sociolinguistic processes in occupational settings. (Dialectology, language change, lexical variability, sociology of work; American English (New Castle, Pennsylvania).)

Mathematical prescriptivism is a language ideology found in school mathematics that uses a discourse of rationality to proscribe language forms perceived as illogical or inefficient. The present study is based on a three-year ethnographic investigation of Math Corps, a community of practice in Detroit, Michigan, in which prescriptive language in the classroom is used both to highlight beneficial algorithms and to build social solidarity. Although motivated by the analogy with English orthographic reform, prescriptivism at Math Corps avoids potentially harmful criticism of community members of the sort often experienced by African American students. A playful linguistic frame, the prescriptive melodrama, highlights valued prescriptions, thereby enculturating students into the locally preferred register, the ‘Math Corps way’, which encompasses social, moral, linguistic, and mathematical practices and norms. A sociolinguistic and anthropological perspective on prescriptivism within communities of practice highlights positive alternatives to the universalizing prescriptions found in other English contexts. (Prescriptivism, language ideology, mathematics education, community of practice, Math Corps, linguistic anthropology, language socialization)*

This article examines how people complain about technology. Using discourse analysis, we inspect sixteen hours of video-recorded focus-group interviews and focused one-on-one discussions where technology was topicalized. We investigate these conversations paying attention to (i) features of language and its situated delivery, including emphasis, word choice, metaphor, and categorizations; and (ii) how these accomplish social actions. We show how interactants use narratives of complaint-like activities about hypothetical categories of people and confessions of their own complainable participation to accomplish a ‘bemoaning’ speech act that manages competing affiliations, demands, and disagreements to construct reasonable moral identities in the situated interaction. By engaging in specific micro-level discursive practices in interaction, participants produce and reproduce what new technologies ‘mean’ to them and for contemporary society. This shows how important it is to examine opinions as situated actions rather than as simple facts about what people believe. (Complaints, accounts, stance, technology, discourse analysis, identity)*

Some of the recent work in the field of media discourse has been concerned with various levels in the organization and structure of audience participation programs on radio and television; other approaches to the analysis of talk in these settings have focused on the interactional frameworks at play in the talk. The aim of this article is to develop the interactional approach by looking at the production of narratives in a mediated context: specifically, the production of a story from two different, and conflicting, points of view. The stories I analyze occur within two different program genres (talk show and television court) where lay members of the public are often called upon to produce accounts of events which are then contested by another participant. This article discusses the significance of tense shifting in these second versions, from narrative past to conversational historic present, in the public construction of believable alternative stories.

This article considers a particular contextualisation of the religious classical and practices associated with it within broader sets of linguistic resources or repertoires. Through a description and analysis of religious classical practices occurring in multilingual urban settings in the UK, the article employs the interpretive frame of performance to account for practice. An introductory overview of religious classical practices is provided, which is followed by a brief discussion of the theoretical considerations surrounding performance and entextualisation. This is followed by the sharing of ethnographic data that aim to demonstrate the performance-oriented and highly entextualised nature of religious classical practice. The article concludes with the suggestion that the latter is an example not only of a set of linguistic resources used predominantly for performative practice but has more in common with scripted theatrical performance than with other conventionally referential communicative practices. (Religious classical, language variety, performance, entextualisation, linguistic resources, linguistic repertoire, Muslim, multilingualism, practice)*

Linguists and psychologists have noted the potential value of studying speech errors since the 1890s (Meringer & Mayer 1895; Freud 1938; Fromkin 1973; MacKay 1972). The reasoning has been that involuntary errors may lay bare certain aspects of the speech production system which are hidden in normal, errorless speech. Today we are closer than ever before to realizing this hope, because (a) we have more complete samples and analyses of spontaneous errors (Fromkin 1973; MacKay 1970; Garrett 1975) and (b) because of considerable success in recent years in attempts to elicit errors of varying complexity in the laboratory (MacKay 1971; Baars & Motley 1974; Motley & Baars 1976). This paper reports some extensions of the experimental approach, extensions which apparently enable us to elicit almost any arbitrary error at any level of complexity.

This article examines the linguistic ideological work entailed in the analyses of Irish by the “revolutionary scholar” and cofounder of the Gaelic League, Eoin MacNeill. It does so to discern one central way in which the essentialized link between the Irish language and a unified Irish people became an efficacious political construction during the armed struggle for independence in the early 20th century. It shows how MacNeill used authoritative linguistic science to engender nationalist sentiment around Irish through semiotic processes even as he challenged a dominant conception of language prevalent in European nationalist movements and social thought. The essay argues that MacNeill wrote against the unilateral valorization of codified linguistic homogeneity and embraced the heterogeneous variation of spoken discourse even as he sought to consolidate Irish national identity through sameness claims. This critical examination suggests that scholars of nationalism reconsider the taken-for-granted homogenizing efforts of nationalist endeavors that are ubiquitously presumed to negatively sanction linguistic variation. (Nationalism, linguistic ideology, Ireland, semiotics, heterogeneity, Eoin MacNeill, Gaelic League, Europe, scientific knowledge)

This study examines the behavior of 331 Spanish speakers, 269 immigrants to the United States and sixty-two native-born individuals, through questionnaires and sociolinguistic interviews. Results show that increased US life experience correlates with expanded use of English in both private and public domains of life. Additionally, greater use of English co-exists with maintenance of fine-grained patterns of structured linguistic variation in Spanish, such that US-born speakers demonstrate remarkable similarity to the immigrant generation in their usage of three variables: (i) subject pronoun presence vs. absence, (ii) grammatical subject position, and (iii) syllable-final /s/. The co-occurence of increased use of English, on one hand, and intergenerational structural continuity in variable linguistic behavior in Spanish, on the other, challenges two misconceptions about Spanish in the United States: that (a) Spanish-speaking immigrants and their US-born children are unwilling or unable to learn English, and (b) regular use of English entails attrition and/or failed acquisition of Spanish. Neither of these views finds empirical support in our data. (Spanish in the United States, comparative variationist linguistics, subject personal pronouns, grammatical subject position, syllable final /s/, bilingualism)

This article uses data from interviews conducted in western North Carolina in order to examine the ways in which speakers enact authoritative, evaluative, and interactional stances to construct individual identity. In this data, we find a subtle interplay between the content of explicit statements, narrative content, and the use of grammatical features associated with Appalachian English (e.g. a-prefixing, nonstandard past tense), and the use of physical artifacts as sources of stance-taking. This article focuses on two speakers' use of (present and not-present) physical artifacts (a placemat, a Civil War era sword, a lock of hair, and a piece of wood with a bullet hole in it) to enact stances that construct individual versions of an Appalachian identity. What this analysis suggests is that it is not just linguistic choices that contribute to stance enactment, but physical objects as well. (Sociolinguistics, stance-taking, Appalachian English, material culture, language and idenity)*

Claims about signed languages present a unique resource for examining sociopolitical formation and change. Examining three claims drawn from original ethnographic data on Hồ Chí Minh City Sign Language, analysis centers on the ways language practices and language ideologies reflect, respond to, and impact sociopolitical formation in Việt Nam, particularly in connection to state restructuring of deaf education during the political reform period (1986 to present). Signer narratives evaluate such circumstances in relation to notions of citizenship, national development, and social participation to posit signed language as the basis for Deaf people's contributions to national development and broader social change. Articulations between signed language and sociopolitical formation have been largely ignored within mainstream social science disciplines and global disability-oriented development, hindering theoretical and practical projects. This article aims to expand the theoretical scope of language-centered inquiry by demonstrating how ethnographic research on signed languages contributes to examination of sociopolitical formation. (Signed language, Việt Nam, deaf education, sociopolitical, citizenship)*

This article reports on the application of the concept of social network to the process of language usage among Yoruba-speaking city dwellers in Ile-Ife, Southwestern Nigeria. The study, modeled on L. Milroy (1980), focuses mainly on phonetic/phonological variation within Common Spoken Yoruba (CmSpY). The analysis of the data gathered mainly within face-to-face interviews shows that, whereas we can claim that there is stratification within CmSpY on the basis of sociodemographic factors, the variable of social network manifests a powerful influence on variation in Yoruba language usage and potential change within CmSpY in Ile-Ife. (Linguistic variation, social networks, linguistic focusing)

One key aspect of threat in terrorists’ language is incitement to violence. Contributing to a fuller understanding of how terrorists use language to encourage people to join their cause, this article examines the role of evaluative language in incitement strategies used by a far-rightist to align with and alienate particular social groups. The Affiliation framework (Knight 2010a; Zappavigna 2011; Etaywe & Zappavigna 2021; Etaywe 2022a), as grounded in systemic functional linguistics, is used to understand how values and social bonds are leveraged in the process of incitement, as explored in a manifesto published online by Brenton Tarrant, preceding his 2019 terrorist attack on two mosques in New Zealand. The findings reveal two main affiliation strategies used for incitement: communion (forging solidarity and alignments) and alienation. These strategies function to construct opposing social groups in discourse, with the condemned groups positioned as a threat, hostility legitimated as morally reasonable, and violence as warranted. (Far-right extremism, incitement, hate crimes, affiliation, morality of terrorism, forensic linguistics, conspiracy theory discourse)

This volume makes available to us a revised and expanded collection of essays originally published in 1992 as a special issue of the journal Pragmatics. In a masterful and greatly expanded introduction to the volume, Kathryn Woolard establishes the parameters of a field that seeks to advance the goal of linking work on language structure with that on language politics, as well as with linguistic and social theory more generally.

The linguistic situation in the Grassfields of Cameroon poses a problem, indeed a challenge. Basic vocabulary counts and shared lexical innovations point to one language classification and historical interpretation; but innovations in noun-classes do not agree and point to another (Voorhoeve 1976). To reconcile these findings in a consistent historical explanation, one must have recourse to some hypothesis as to the past relationships among the speakers of the languages. Such a hypothesis must be controlled by whatever can be known about the sociolinguistic history, as it were, of the area. In recent ethnohistorical research, I have been able to reconstruct a nineteenth-century pattern of multilingualism as an essential part of the social and political fabric of the Grassfields. Of the three hypotheses that might be advanced to explain the present language situation, the third is best supported by this reconstruction and other evidence. Further work is underway to test the hypothesis. In the meanwhile, the case shows the necessity of sociolinguistic as well as narrowly linguistic reconstruction in explanation of actual cases of change.

Pronouns and terms of address in interviews, letters, and speeches in Neues Deutschland reflect a variety of address norms. They depend on the participants' social status, geographic origin, party membership, and other factors, and show pronoun avoidance in a number of cases. Sociolinguistic methods applied to written texts can thus reveal possible changes in address norms in the German Democratic Republic. (Sociolinguistics, text linguistics, pronouns of address, language in the German Democratic Republic)

This article employs conversation analysis to explore the interpenetration of grammar and preference organization in English conversation in comparison with a previous study for Japanese. Whereas varying the word order of major syntactic elements is a vital grammatical resource in Japanese for accomplishing the potentially universal task of delaying dispreferred responses to a range of first actions, it is found to have limited utility in English. A search for alternative operations and devices that conversationalists deploy for this objective in English points to several grammatical constructions that can be tailored to maximize the delay of dispreferred responses. These include the fronting of relatively mobile, syntactically “non-obligatory” elements of clause structure and the employment of various copular constructions. A close interdependence is observed between the rudimentary grammatical resources available in the two languages and the types of operations that are respectively enlisted for the implementation of the organization of preference.