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)

This article considers the ways in which the Welsh and English languages are currently used in Bangor, a cathedral and university city in North Wales. The two languages carry different kinds of authority in different contexts and are acquired in different ways by children from different backgrounds. Some religious institutions have a clear commitment to one language, but others practice various forms of bilingualism. The relationship between the two languages in education and the other public services is partially determined by consciously formulated language policies but is less consistent than some official statements might suggest. The patterns of usage in commercial and domestic life are even more various and frequently involve complex forms of code-switching. (Welsh, English, Wales, bilingualism)

The sociolinguistic pressures now exerted on the Gullah-speaking communities match the general conditions that DeCamp (1971b) described for postcreole speech communities or communities in which the traditional language variety is decreolizing or dying. There is a correspondence between the dominant official language and the creole, and there is sufficient breakdown in the formerly rigid social stratification brought on by educational programs and other acculturative forces to cause social mobility and to motivate large numbers of Gullah speakers to modify their speech in the direction of standard English. Preliminary research of the processes involved in this modification activity reveals that certain features of the pronominal system are elaborating and dying while certain other features of this system are remaining static and unchanged. Elaboration is well underway in the nominative case, for example, while in the objective case elaboration has barely begun. (Sociolinguistic pressures, postcreole, decreolizing or dying, social mobility, certain features, elaborating, static)

Close examination of a segment of classroom discourse permits definition of a set of linguistic devices and rhetorical structures that characterize the primary speaker's repertoire. As the discourse moves from dialog to monolog, and the teacher's roles and ideological assumptions come into conflict, these discourse patterns are seen to reveal the shifting contexts of talk and social personae that the teacher must use language to reconcile. The analysis claims that, under such conditions of discourse stress, opposing contexts can be temporarily harmonized through discourse structure, even though propositional content is contradictory. (Linguistic anthropology, education, coherence, discourse analysis)

Standardization of terminology is a process calling for a thoughtful combination of adherence to linguistic principles and awareness of the sociocultural issues involved. The case of Serbo-Croatian linguistic terminology currently used in Yugoslavia may serve as an example of the different dimensions of sociolinguistic variation in this area. Especially in culturally heterogeneous societies, the distinction between standardization and unification must be observed. (Terminology, language standardization, sociology of language, applied linguistics; Serbo-Croatian.)

Neoliberalism has permeated every sphere of social life, including education and language learning, seeking to produce a particular kind of subject, homo economicus, with the dispositions required to manage the self as an economic project. This article unravels the workings of the unfulfilled promise of neoliberal English education and its damaging consequences on a high-achieving female university graduate in the context of contemporary Hong Kong. Combining Marxist and Foucauldian perspectives, while simultaneously drawing on Goffman's concepts of stigma and spoiled identity, our analysis is informed by positioning theory and captures the impact of what we have termed the English language gaze on our informant's sense of self. Seen through a Foucauldian lens, the data reveal the extent, but also the limits, of her assimilation of neoliberal governmentality, while the Marxist lens allows us to account for her plight in terms of alienation and the resulting stigma of a spoiled identity. (Neoliberalism, governmentality, alienation, stigma, spoiled identity, English learning, English language gaze)*

This ethnographic study examines deaf or hard-of-hearing children's socialization in an oral classroom, a setting designed to promote spoken language as the primary mode of communication. Drawing from nine months of observations, I describe how the meanings assigned to children's vocalizations create a system of values and judgements that organizes and regulates classroom behavior. Specifically, vocalization itself is oriented to as a moral practice that is necessary for the mutual understanding and accomplishment of classroom activities. Informed by ethnomethodological and language-socialization perspectives, I illustrate how participants co-construct a local moral order wherein students are held accountable for ‘using their words’ to perform social actions. Analyses discuss three interactional contexts where moral issues are routinely constructed as contingent on and resolvable through vocalization—children's help-seeking, children's disputes, and negotiations of classroom participation—thereby shaping children's understanding of language use and reflecting broader institutional expectations and ideology regarding oral communication. (Moral order, preschool children, socialization)*

This article examines the questioning of US Attorney General Jeff Sessions by Senators Angus King and Kamala Harris during a congressional hearing. Analyses of the two exchanges, grounded in conversation analytic (CA) methodology, reveal that simultaneous and near-simultaneous talk initiated by the senators is pervasive in both exchanges. However, Sessions does ‘being interrupted’ (Hutchby 1996; Bilmes 1997)—that is, displays an orientation toward his interlocutors’ turns as a violation of his speaking rights—three times more often when he is questioned by Harris rather than King. The discrepancy in Sessions’ handling of the senators’ turns may explain why Harris is sanctioned by two colleagues during her questioning and why commentators have characterized her as aggressive and interruptive, while at the same time lauding (or ignoring) King. These findings ultimately suggest that doing being interrupted may influence how others perceive an interaction and those participating in it. (Institutional discourse, interruption, latching, overlap, political discourse)

Despite a growing literature on the production and reproduction of linguistic inequality in mass media, we know little about how individuals experience such sociolinguistic marginalization. To fill this gap, this study examines a monolingual Taiwanese elderly woman’s experiences of television viewing. In the context of language shift in Taiwan after 40 years of Mandarin-only policy, language hierarchy persists despite the current policy of multilingualism. Although the subject does not understand the referential meaning of most shows because of language barriers, she recognizes socially indexical meanings about the ranking of languages and how she is positioned and excluded. The unequal participant structure in the dynamic interactions between two overlapping communicative events of television viewing and family discussions of the shows doubly marginalizes her. This study demonstrates how the choice of linguistic code in television programming conveys meaning and structures participation frameworks that engage minority monolingual individuals in dialogic processes of identity construction. (Sociolinguistic marginalization, participation framework, Bakhtin, identity, Taiwan, television)*

In recent years, the East End of London has been dramatically transformed from a poor, working-class area, to one of the most fashionable neighbourhoods in the world. Adding to a growing body of research which examines the sociolinguistic dynamics of gentrifying neighbourhoods, this article draws on data from two ethnographic projects to examine how young people from the gentrified (i.e. working-class) and gentrifier (i.e. middle-class) communities index place attachment in East London. I demonstrate that for the gentrified community, place attachment is related to the ethnic and cultural genealogy of the immediate, local neighbourhood. Whilst for the gentrifiers, place identity is associated with the cosmopolitan economic and social opportunities of the city. I argue that whilst these communities occupy the same physical neighbourhood, these discourses suggest that they conceptually and socioculturally reside in two very different cities. (Gentrification, place, space, East London)*

A previously unreported Amharic argot, that of a clique of unattached young women in a bar district of Addis Ababa, is described and traced to its source in a schoolboy argot of some dozen years earlier. The argot rules are simple, ingenious, and effective. A brief comparison is made of this argot and others in terms of social setting and uses. (Amharic, argots, Ethiopia, expressive language, language in context, language play, sociolinguistics)

A critical examination of the findings of Valentine (1985, 1986), studies devoted to cross-sex communication in Hindi and Indian English, is shown to reveal that the assumptions of the models on which such descriptions are based are not only nonexplanatory but also untenable. They fail because they ignore hierarchical power. Their failure “abroad” must be seen as an invitation to reflect on their alleged success back home. (Discourse, discourse strategies, cross-sex communication, Hindi, Indian English, English, sociolinguistics)

Five examples are presented of how native speakers may try to explain a grammatical point to a linguist, and, in the absence of a suitable metalanguage, adopt some “lateral” way of demonstrating the point. They may, for instance, give another paradigmatic form of a word under scrutiny to show its word class; they may switch to another dialect to clarify some ambiguity; they may add some extra sentence constituents to each noun in a lexical elicit, to reveal its gender class. (Field methods, grammatical explanation, use of informants/consultants, Australian Aboriginal languages, Amazonian languages)

This study suggests how easily distorted communication can arise in formal administrative discourse when the interests of those with some stake in the matter under discussion are not represented among the participants. After discussing the nature of power and its exercise in administrative settings, the article presents three episodes of discourse analysis. Members of a Board of Trustees were highly successful in debating and reaching suitable conclusions when the agenda items concerned their own close interests; they were able to create a discursive context that was relatively free of distorting ideologies, and which allowed participants to judge the sincerity, truth, justifiability, and meaningfulness of what was said. However, when the meeting agenda broached the affairs of an out-group with no known patronage on the Board, distortions in communication and small injustices became common; the out-group's interests were compromised. The article generalizes from the use of discursive power in this instance to the treatment of other culturally different minorities whose views and interests are not well represented among administrators and policy makers. It recommends how discursive power could be exercised more fairly in social institutions, and in public administration generally. (Discourse, power, minority groups, ideology, educational administration)