Recent research has suggested that two linguistic processes are displacing Cockney: the emergence of Multicultural London English (MLE) in inner London and dialect levelling (e.g. Kerswill & Williams 2005). This study investigates firstly whether Cockney phonetic features have ‘moved East’ to Essex (Fox 2015), and secondly the features’ indexicality in relation to place and identity. Fifty-four participants from Debden, an outpost of the Cockney Diaspora, completed a sociolinguistic interview. Vowel measurements were made from a wordlist and passage, and quantitative attitudinal and qualitative data were extracted from a questionnaire and interviews. Overall, changes in identity as a result of social change exceeded linguistic changes, and linguistic labels were not interpreted uniformly across the community. Whilst Cockney variants were largely maintained in young speakers, they were transposed onto an ‘Essex’ accent. Furthermore, some young women but no young men considered themselves Cockney, likely due to the matrifocal nature of Cockney. (Cockney, phonetic variation and change, dialect levelling, identity, indexicality, gender)

Discourse in late modernity purports to demonstrate the significance of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), principally a European disciplinary formation, for constructionist social theory across disciplines and social settings, and to argue for the specific importance of CDA within a broader sociology of modernity. The book is principally a work of theory-building and exemplification, meant for a broad scholarly audience. Unfortunately, however, scholars outside the CDA community will be frustrated by the book's dense and sometimes confused use of undefined technical terms, as well as by the very thin analyses of the volume's few empirical examples of complex theoretical points. Terms such as “discourse,” “structure,” and “text” are used in diverse ways, but often without apparent concern for the conflicting traditions in which they are central concepts. The book also politicizes questions of social power in ways that may alienate many readers who do not share the authors' Eurocentric politics. Finally, the writing in this volume suffers from needlessly dense and complex prose syntax. These rhetorical problems are not as minor as they may sound, for they disguise – and, thereby, ironically reveal – more substantial flaws in the core arguments of the volume.

A review of A. Suresh Canagarajah, A geopolitics of academic writing. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. Pp. x, 332. Pb. $27.95.

This article presents the results of a quantitative analysis of language variation and place attachment in two different places in Denmark—a rural, mono-ethnic village where traditional dialect is still used in everyday practices, and a multiethnic suburban social housing district where speakers use features associated with regional dialect and multiethnic youth styles. It is argued that variationist sociolinguistics, dialect research, as well as sociolinguistics that foregrounds situated interaction analysis need to develop methodologies that include and combine information about speakers’ individual mobility histories, local practices, and future orientations in relation to language use and place. For this purpose, this study employs a quantified measure, an index of local attachment, of speakers’ attachment to their local area. The index is calculated on the basis of insights from ethnographic fieldwork and interviews, and is compared to the variation of three linguistic variables in each location. Results show differences between the two places, the rural and the urban communities, as well as between individuals that can be explained by differences in place affordances, life histories, and future orientation. (Place, local attachment, mobility, dialect, multiethnic speech style, quantitative analysis)*

This study examines the linguistic aspects of the formation of a community of practice (CofP) and analyses one aspect of the common repertoire that is being actively developed within the community. On the one hand, it looks at the community itself, placing emphasis on the exact practices, beliefs, and resources that can identify a group brought together at times against their will, as a CofP. On the other, this research takes under scrutiny one specific linguistic variable (Japanese negation) to show how involvement in a CofP can bring about rapid and unexpected changes in the meaning and use of a linguistic variant. (Community of practice, indexical meaning, Japanese, negation)*

As Kolers (1972) has pointed out, the study of bilingualism offers a distinctive way to study some of the mental activities underlying the way that people use language. Code-switching (the introduction into the context of one language stretches of speech which exhibit primarily the other language's phonological and morphological features) offers a unique opportunity for studying some of the more complicated aspects of bilingual speech, particularly regarding the momentary choice of language. Researchers whose work has influenced this paper include Haugen, Weinreich, Mackey, Fishman, Rayfleld, Clyne, Hasselmo, Gumperz, Diebold, Lance, Valdés-Fallis, Pfaff, and Timm. Among the list of poorly understood phenomena in code-switching are (I) seemingly unpredictable switching, and (2) the possibility of formal, complex rules underlying different code-switching patterns. It is these open questions which modelling might illuminate.

An Introduction to the Edward Sapir centenary session at the November 1984 meetings of the American Anthropological Association, Denver, Colorado, with remarks read at the 1984 Linguistic Society of America meetings (Baltimore, Maryland) on the occasion of the Sapir lecutre given by Professor Emmon Bach, University of Massachusetts (28 December 1984).

The Diola-Fogny of Sénégal, West Africa, socially intuit with the meta-linguistic terms ‘big’ and ‘thin’ the tense/lax vowel contrast that is basic to their phonology. The two terms are primarily used to identify speech variation among individuals and groups. Examination revealed that speakers who made relatively greater use of vowel harmony were characterized as ‘big’ in contrast to others who were thought of as ‘thin’ speakers. The ‘big’/‘thin’ distinction provides the Fogny with one means by which they place the speech of an individual. In addition, this meta-linguistic device either is used to express indirectly the social place of an alter vis-à-vis an ego in terms of simple sameness or difference, or, when more than two people are involved, in terms of some form of segmentary opposition. (Sénégal, meta-linguistics, social interaction, phonology.)

Researchers have called for studies that link the macro and the micro in language policy research. In turn, the notion of ‘micro’ has been theorised as referring either to the micro implementation of macro policies or to micro policies. In this article, a third way of thinking about the relationship between the macro and the micro in language policy—referred to as the interpretive perspective—is proposed. In this perspective, macro language policies and micro language choice practices are seen as interdependent, as shaping each other. The article substantiates this view drawing on a practice I call translinguistic apposition and that I have observed in a variety of ‘most highly regulated’ texts in Rwanda. However, for an in- depth understanding, the practice is described drawing on data from a single source, namely the Rwandan multilingual media blog www.igihe.com. The article demonstrates how this practice can be seen as shaped by the Rwandan macro language policy and, conversely, how the same macro policy can be seen as written into being through the same micro level practice. (Language policy, micro language policy, micro implementation of macro policy, translanguaging, translinguistic apposition, interpretive perspective)

The explanatory model of cross-cultural miscommunication, or crosstalk, is extended here through a multi-feature, multi-dimensional analysis of Soviet and American speakers' discourse in two three-hour audio/video “spacebridge” meetings. The study demonstrates that variation between speakers' uses of co-occurring sets of lexical and syntactic features can contribute to crosstalk. Crosstalk is shown to be functionally motivated by interlocutors' different constructions of the speech-event context and norms of interpretation.

A factor analysis of lexical and syntactic features in spacebridge participants' discourse identifies two main dimensions of stylistic variation; use of the sets of co-occurring features that constitute these dimensions are interpreted as performing different discourse functions, and thereby indexing different aspects of the speech-event context. Soviet floor turns that exhibit the greatest stylistic divergence from American stylistic behavior and expectations are shown to correlate with communicative breakdowns in the spacebridges, and thereby to contribute to crosstalk. The analysis suggests that, at some level, stylistic contextualization cues are quantitatively “analyzed” in real time by discourse participants, and it demonstrates some of the explanatory potential of quantitative modeling of complex indexical processes such as stylistic accommodation, divergence, and opposition. I wish to thank Doug Biber, Elinor Ochs, and Barbara Johnstone for invaluable feedback on this study.

A sociolinguist's first reaction to Lewis’ critique of Labov's thirty-five-year-old principle of error correction (PEC) would likely be defensive or dismissive. While never formulated as the full-fledged ‘theory of social change’ Lewis portrays it to be, the PEC has indeed offered a valuable ‘theoretical starting place for diverse social-change efforts’ (Lewis, this issue, p. 326) by (socio)linguists over the years, repeatedly allowing us to use our technical training to provide more accurate diagnoses of language-related social issues than nonlinguists could, and thereby paving the way for their successful (re)solution. An early example is the 1985 trial of Paul Prinzivalli (see Labov 1988), who was rightfully found not guilty of making telephone bomb threats against Pan Am Airlines on the basis of Labov's careful phonetic evidence that his speech did not match the caller's recorded Boston accent. A more recent example is that of Voigt et al. (2017), whose computational analysis of police body-camera footage from 981 stops of Black and White drivers in Oakland, CA revealed that officers showed significantly more verbal respect to White than to Black drivers. This research is now being used to improve police training and police-community interactions in Oakland. In both cases, we could argue that, as in medicine, without an accurate diagnosis, a successful solution would elude us. And we might add that community beneficiaries of the (socio)linguist's on-the-ground ‘error correction and knowledge dissemination’ (Lewis, this issue, p. 339) might value this more than the critical race theorist's lofty theorizing.

In two perception experiments we explore the social indexicality of numerical expressions, comparing the evaluation of three variants: precise (e.g. ‘forty-nine minutes’) vs. explicitly approximate (e.g. ‘about fifty minutes’) vs. underspecified (e.g. ‘fifty minutes’). We ask two questions: (i) What constellations of social meanings are associated with each of these variants? (ii) How are such indexical associations modulated by the conversational setting? We find that the choice of approximate vs. precise forms differentially impact speaker evaluation along the social dimensions of Status, Solidarity, and anti-Solidarity, with underspecified numbers showing a flexible behavior. Furthermore, these associations are to some extent affected by the conversational setting, in particular the demands on descriptive precision placed by the context and the interlocutors’ goals. These findings reveal an intimate connection between pragmatic reasoning and social perception, highlighting the importance of integrating pragmatic theory in the study of social indexicality. (Social meaning, pragmatic variation, social perception, numerals, (im)precision)*

When a society faces a moment of crisis, its language can mirror, expose, and reinforce societal chaos and fault lines. As India came to terms with COVID-19, the coronavirus’ impacts on different populations exposed and widened India's deep social, economic, and religious divides. This article studies the language of India's response to COVID-19 surrounding three major events that occurred in the early months of the pandemic: the janta curfew, the Tablighi Jamaat incident, and the migrant worker crisis. Through an analysis of media reports, speeches made by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and representations on social media, we see how forms of linguistic trickery—silence, presuppositions, accommodations, othering, dog whistling, and povertyism—were used to suppress, harm, and marginalize two minority groups: Muslims and migrant workers. This article demonstrates how those in power use language to reflect, shape, and reinforce meaning, social hierarchies, and marginalization in a time of crisis. (Linguistic trickery, othering, silence, presupposition, accommodation, dog whistling, povertyism)