Before accepting claims of the function of linguistic stylization, it is imperative that we are certain of what we are examining. Mikhail Bakhtin's widely cited definition that stylization is an “artistic representation of another's linguistic style” (1986:362) leaves unclear what counts as “artistic,” making identifying stylizations simultaneously intuitively obvious and empirically illusive. Drawing from 270 hours of data from a radio program, the current study uses interactional discourse and acoustic analyses to compare one disc jockey's exaggerations of ethnically salient accents (stylizations) with his mundane use of reported speech. The analyses demonstrate that in both types of talk he uses a similar bundle of interactional and acoustic resources to design his talk as belonging to someone else. The link between reported and stylized speech places stylizations in an analytical category distinct from that of crossing and its issues of language ownership. The pertinent questions are those of speaker responsibility. (Crossing, stylization, reported speech, discourse analysis, acoustic analysis)*

In this article, the collective language shift from Swedish to Ukrainian in the traditionally Swedish-speaking community of Gammalsvenskby is studied particularly through interview data from sixteen first-generation nonspeakers of the heritage language. The article argues that it is not enough to study collective language shift merely from the point of view of the last-speaker generation, but that the nonspeaker generation's views are also needed to understand and describe language shift, since they are also participants in language shift. Two themes, seemingly central in language shift research, are explored: agency in language nontransmission, and external pressure on heritage-language speakers to conform linguistically. The conclusion of the study is that most of the interviewed nonspeakers see the language shift mainly as a pragmatic development, although some also quote external pressure as a factor. (Language shift, Gammalsvenskby, nonspeaker)*

On 7 January 2021, Jan Blommaert died aged 59, after a ten-month battle with cancer. He was an extraordinary person and a brilliant academic, and there have been a great many very moving personal accounts of how much Jan meant to the people he interacted with. I knew and worked with him for over twenty-five years, and during his protracted illness, for me and for a lot of others, it was good to be able to tell him directly how much I owed him. But beyond the warm, hospitable, humorous and hugely energising individual we knew, Jan was profoundly committed to—indeed lived—a programme of sociolinguistics that he often traced to the writings of Dell Hymes, the founder of Language in Society. A number of this programme's core elements were spelled out in the introduction to Hymes’ ground-breaking 1969 collection, Reinventing Anthropology, a ‘book… for people for whom “the way things are” is not reason enough for the ways things are, who find fundamental questions pertinent and in need of personal answer’ (1969:7). For my account of the value and vitality that Jan brought to sociolinguistics, I have borrowed from the title of Hymes’ introduction, ‘The use of anthropology: Critical, political, personal’ and, as well as citing some of Jan's own words, I also draw on the reflections of others as evidence of the vigour, clarity, and coherence with which he articulated a practice and purpose for work on language in society.

It is unusual for a collection of articles to be as interesting and valuable (while simultaneously diverse) as are the articles assembled here. The papers in this excellent collection reflect the dramatic change that language and gender research has undergone in the past decade, and as such they provide an extremely useful source for anyone seeking a fresh view of the research in this field.

Philip Glenn, Laughter in interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xi, 190, Hb $75.00.

Drawing on extant research in conversation analysis (CA) and other fields, Glenn's entry in the “Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics” series is both an excellent introduction to CA for those outside the field and an interesting exploration of the social phenomenon of laughter. The first chapter gives a general survey of the research, which has often focused on the physicality of laughter and its relation to humor. Ultimately, however, the chapter suggests a function of laughter beyond expressing amusement: affiliation with co-participants in social interaction. In chap. 2, Glenn provides a helpful outline of CA. He emphasizes CA's focus on participants' perspectives and provides a cogent explanation for CA's meticulous transcription conventions with the example of silences, marked on CA transcripts in tenths of seconds. To leave them out, he argues, would be to assume from the beginning that silences in talk mean nothing (p. 37) – an idea that most competent talkers, let alone CA researchers, would reject out of hand.

This study investigates the organization of conversational interaction via push-to-talk mobile radios. Operating like long-range walkie-talkies, the mobile radios mediate a remote state of incipient talk; at the push of a button, speakers can initiate, engage, disengage, and reengage turn-by-turn talk. Eight friends used the mobile radios for one week; 50 of their conversational exchanges were analyzed using conversation analytic methods. The findings describe the contour of their conversational exchanges: how turn-by-turn talk is engaged, sustained, and disengaged. Similar to a continuing state of incipient talk in copresence, opening and closing sequences are rare. Instead, speakers engage turn-by-turn talk by immediately launching the purpose of the call. Speakers disengage turn-by-turn talk by orienting to the relevance of a lapse at sequence completion. Once engaged, the mobile radio system imposes silence between speakers' turns at talk, giving them a resource for managing a remote conversation amid ongoing copresent activities.We are grateful to Mimi and her friends for making it possible to collect this data. We also thank Jim Thornton, Marilyn Whalen, Paul Drew, Bob Moore and Luke Plurkowski for their helpful insights.