Drawing on data generated from a two-year ethnographic observation with a group of multiethnic Black women, this investigation delves into the ways they employ discursive and linguistic strategies, namely solidarity through difference and distinction, solidarity through denaturalizing difference, and solidarity through shared struggles and learning in deictically anchored interactions. The study presents a moment-by-moment analysis of culturally and socially situated conversations. These conversations allow us to see how the social actors enact different stance-taking and scaling practices to construct meanings about race that intersect with gender/transnational identities. Discursive practices show that when we closely attend to race, transnationalism, and gender, specifically considering the particularity of Black womanhood, new and more complex ways of understanding transnational identity formation emerge. Participants’ constructions indicate that women co-construct a unique brand of Black feminist solidarity that is not based on similarity but meaningfully created through differentiation and distinction. (Black immigrant women, solidarity, stance-taking, scaling and deixis difference, African diaspora, intersectionality)*

In this article, we provide the first quantitative account of the frequent use of embedding in Shawi, a Kawapanan language spoken in Peruvian Northwestern Amazonia. We collected a corpus of ninety-two Frog Stories (Mayer 1969) from three different field sites in 2015 and 2016. Using the glossed corpus as our data, we conducted a generalised mixed model analysis, where we predicted the use of embedding with several macrosocial variables, such as gender, age, and education level. We show that bilingualism (Amazonian Spanish-Shawi) and education, mostly restricted by complex gender differences in Shawi communities, play a significant role in the establishment of linguistic preferences in narration. Moreover, we argue that the use of embedding reflects the impact of the mestizo1 society from the nineteenth century until today in Santa Maria de Cahuapanas, reshaping not only Shawi demographics but also linguistic practices. (Post-colonial societies, Amazonian linguistics, Kawapanan, Shawi, embedding, language variation and change, contact linguistics)*

This collection aims to offer, in the words of its editor, “a first introduction” to the study of discourse. While its companion vol. 1, Discourse as structure and process, is mainly concerned with cognitive issues, the contributors to vol. 2 focus on social organization and social processes.

For more than a decade, Americanists have been working in the shadow of Greenberg's Language in the Americas (1987) and the hemisphere-wide classification of American Indian languages proposed there. Greenberg's work, based for the most part on naïve comparisons of lexical data with which he was largely unfamiliar, was met with considerable skepticism by scholars familiar with the problems of American linguistic classification. But Greenberg, a senior linguist who is widely recognized as the father of modern linguistic typology, aggressively defended his methods and results, and he made allies among geneticists and archeologists who found that his tripartite classification (Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene, and “Amerind”) dovetailed with some of their own ideas. Moreover, his book was published by a leading university press. Mainly for these reasons – certainly not for its critical acceptance – Language in the Americas has become a standard reference work. It is in most academic libraries in North America, and in many it is given a place of honor on the reference shelf – together with Merritt Ruhlen's Guide to the world's languages, I: Classification (published by the same press, 1987), which, at least for the Americas, does little more than uncritically recapitulate Greenberg.

The pandemic has exacerbated moral panics about conspiracy theories. Yet defining what conspiracy theories are is just as fraught as figuring out what to do about them. This article provides the first empirical demonstration of how the categories ‘conspiracy theory’ and ‘conspiracy theorist’ are used in social interaction. We examined comments from a New Zealand politician about a Covid-19 outbreak at the start of the election period. Using conversation analysis, membership categorisation analysis, and discursive psychology, we tracked how his talk was built and interpreted by participants. The findings show how a conspiracy theory was made recognisable through the machinery of storytelling and how its status as a conspiracy theory was accomplished and challenged through categorisation. We argue that conceptualising conspiracy theories as social actions offers a way to move beyond definitional debates to examine how participants understand and use conspiracy theories in everyday life. (Conspiracy theory, social interaction, categorisation)

This article investigates how marginal individuals construct a productive self in an interview. It reports on a case study of three women—a squatter, a rough sleeper, and an Irish Traveller—who inhabit uncertain and threatened homes. In response to dominant discourses of productivity, in the interviews the speakers’ talk reflects the desire to be perceived as able and knowledgeable individuals. Thus, rejecting their marginal subjectivities, the three women propose profitable solutions to society's issues along the very same principles of productivity heralded by dominant society. Framed within a performative notion of identity, the study elaborates on the notion of a non-sexual desire as the trigger of most human actions. The results suggest that marginality is not a fixed and segregated state of being and the stereotype of individuals like those discussed in the study as passive and out of touch must be challenged. (Marginality, space, squatter, Irish Traveller, rough sleeper, desire/aspiration, epistemic and agentive self, neo-liberalism)*

Anti-Black language ideologies manifest in exclusionary language policies (e.g. Sung & Allen-Handy 2019), educational tracking (e.g. Sung 2018), and scholarly claims of Black ‘deficiency’ (Smitherman 2000). A liberal educational research tradition has countered with ethnographic accounts of cultural ‘mismatch’ (Michaels 2006) vis-à-vis Black educational ‘failure’. Conducting a textual analysis of an archive of ethnography of communication texts, I locate multiple genealogical linkages holding between ‘mismatch’ and deprivation discourses, principally ones centered on representations of ‘pathological’ Black ‘matriarchy’. Paralleling Black feminist theorizations of ‘fungible Black flesh’ (e.g. Hartman 1997), I account for these representations by conceptualizing ‘fungible Black sound’. I further argue that ‘fungible fugitivity’ (e.g. Snorton 2017), that is, how Blackness fluidly responds to white incursion is linguistically realized in acts of ‘signifyin(g)’ (e.g. Mitchell-Kernan 1999), yielding the analytic category ‘fungible(ly) fugitive Black sound’. Lastly, I reread an ethnographic text with this analytic to illustrate its affordance for (re)imagining Black futurity. (Black sound, fungibility, fugitivity, raciolinguistic ideologies, ethnography of communication, Black studies)*

Bilingualism is a mainstay of current sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic research, and it has successfully migrated from the narrow concerns of “applied linguistics” to the very core of theoretical linguistic debate and argumentation. Research on bilinguals at both the societal and individual levels is now contributing to a deeper understanding of the place of language in human interaction and cognition. By its very nature, the study of bilingualism requires that researchers become involved with speakers at the level of communication, often in field situations that require subtle sociological and psychological insights relating to language choice and language switching as speakers attempt to establish personal and group identity.

The past decade has seen a remarkable resurgence of interest in the possible influences of language on “thought” – that is, relativism, the “Whorf Theory Complex” (cf. Lee 1996), or the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (LRH). On the occasion of the Whorf centenary in 1997, a number of international conferences, workshops, and symposia were dedicated to the topic. This volume presents a collection of papers from the 26th International LAUD Symposium held at Gerhard Mercator University in Duisburg, Germany, April 1–5, 1998, under the title “Humboldt and Whorf Revisited: Universal and Culture-Specific Conceptualizations in Grammar and Lexis.

It would be unjust to say that languages of ethnic minorities of Siberia and the Far East of Russia have not received the attention of linguists and anthropologists, yet until now there has been no book that has gathered, classified, and compared data on the sociolinguistic situation of these minorities over the whole Soviet period. This is the topic of Vakhtin's new book. It deals almost exclusively with the exterior aspect of the history of the languages; it does not analyze structural changes in the languages themselves.