My theoretical aim in this article is to focus on an examination of processual enactments of scale in light of the technological affordances that are currently at the disposal of a significant majority of humans. I offer the terms algorithmic scales and algorithmic scalar affordances to describe one activist's engagement of practical theories of scale—her ‘algorithmic imagination’ (Bucher 2017)—which led her to design her audience in ways intended to algorithmically scale up, or amplify, her activities on Facebook—to enhance their spread numerically, rapidly, and translocally, making use of the algorithmically constructed communicative possibilities or affordances available to her on the site. (Social media, scale, algorithms, audience design, Facebook, activism, nation, politics)

Firmly grounded in local sociopolitical constraints, language policies at Istanbul's Kurdish-run eating establishments often place Kurdish employees’ cultural identity construction at odds with their workplaces’ economic viability. In the face of rigid structures that cement the dominance of Turkish, the Kurdish managers highlighted in a previous study exercise limited agency to enact language policies that align with their pro-Kurdish ideologies, rendering Kurdish largely invisible. This article revisits these themes by examining a nearby Kurdish-run restaurant with a language policy that violates this norm. Applying Darvin & Norton's (2015) model of investment, analyses of observations and interviews consider identity, ideology, and economic capital vis-à-vis employees’ perceived valuation of Kurdish as a workplace language. Results suggest that capital ownership emboldens the audible articulation of Kurdish identities, which emerge from pluricentrically oriented ideologies, fostering resistance to local language policy norms. (Investment, language policy, capital, Kurdish, ideology, pluricentricity)

Many casual observers outside Asia believe that everyone in Hong Kong, owing to its British colonial past, speaks English as fluently as the queen (or, at least, George Bush). Others, hearing the grunts of martial artists like Jackie Chan, might think that English is truly a foreign entity to the people of Hong Kong, as unknown to them as, say, pizza or hamburgers. Both assumptions, as Kingsley Bolton shows in this fascinating new collection of essays, are quite wrong. Instead, the place of English in Hong Kong is probably unique in the world: It is neither simply a variety poorly mimicking the language of the UK, nor an imperial tongue imposed on a subservient populace. It is these dynamics of culture, identity, economics, globalization, education – and, indeed, politics – that are addressed in this stimulating book.

The article describes the practices through which patients’ self-presentations are challenged in psychotherapy. Based on the analysis of thirty-eight instances from psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, analyzed with methods of conversation analysis, narrative analysis, and coding, this article reports on how therapists challenge patients’ self-conceptualizations in response to patients’ self-presentations. Challenges mostly follow patients’ descriptive, narrative, or evaluative accounts that include a strong claim about their self. Challenges to the self pertain to core issues of the therapeutic projects. They are mostly built in ways that show its sensitivity to probable rejection by the patient. Overwhelmingly, the challenge is accounted for by reference to shared knowledge built in the participants’ shared interactional history. Arguably, psychotherapy is a particular setting where the organization of face-work is modified, as occasional challenging of the co-interactant's self-presentation is part of the institutional task of the professional participant. Data are in Finnish and German. (Self, psychotherapy, Goffman, conversation analysis)*

This article demonstrates the potential for phonological variables to be a resource for the expression of ideology and identity in historical circumstances such as those experienced recently in the Catalonian procés. Based on a corpus consisting of communicative events from sixteen leading Catalan politicians, four Spanish linguistic variants are analyzed. Apart from a handful of structural predictors, the mixed-effects logistic regression analysis shows the robustness of (only) two extralinguistic factor groups: the social origin and the identification of the politicians as Catalan nationalist (mainly pro-independence) or not nationalist. As regards the latter, the most significant of all predictors, the analysis shows how nationalist politicians always favor the sounds mainly associated with vernacular pronunciation in eastern Catalan speech communities ([-ɫ] and [-t]), but at the same time also favor other sounds associated with more canonical and pan-Hispanic prestige variants ([-ð] and [-ð-]). These apparently contradictory results can be explained if the social meaning of all variants is considered around the same indexical field, that of authenticity. In this sense, nationalists seem to ‘appropriate’ the Spanish language by tingeing its expressive habits with uses closer to their language. (Phonological variation, nationalism, ideology, languages in contact, Spanish, Catalan)*

The present article reflects on the concept of ‘spatial repertoire’ through a ‘trans’-perspective in order to explain the trans-formation of migrants’ homescapes during the pandemic—a time of restricted mobility. In the context of translocal im~mobility, this ethnographically informed multiple case study explores how three Greek ‘brain drain’ immigrants performed homescapes in the online-offline nexus from October to February 2020. Employing a critical discourse analytic approach, the findings showcase the pandemic biopolitics that have resulted in the de/reterritorialisation of everyday sociospatial activities, thus creating heterotopic places within the home. Specifically, the integration of work and political activity into the homescape has led to the resemiotisation of the linguistic landscape of homes and the dissolution of boundaries between ‘named’ spaces in homes. The concept of ‘transpatial repertoire’ captures the hybridisation of the pandemic-affected homescape, taking into consideration the vulnerabilities and emergent resistances to biopolitical control. In other words, it sheds light on the emergent heterotopias of im~mobility. (Pandemic, heterotopia, transpatial repertoire, linguistic landscape, homescape)*

Deborah Cameron & Don Kulick, Language and sexuality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi, 176. Pb $21.00.

Paul McIlvenny (ed.), Talking gender and sexuality. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. x, 332. Hb $106.00.

Two recent books, Language and sexuality, by Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick, and Talking gender and sexuality (TGS), edited by Paul McIlvenny, seek to elucidate the social construction of gender and sexuality by combining the methods of interactive discourse analysis with the theoretical insights of poststructuralism, feminism, and queer theory. Guided by the basic ethnomethodological question “How are gender and sexuality ‘done’?”, the authors of both volumes are motivated, at least implicitly, by a political commitment to deconstructing and opposing sexism and heteronormativity (the ideologically enforced assumption that all people are or should be straight). In one way or another, therefore, both books also ask, paraphrasing McIlvenny, “By what linguistic-interactional means might normative gender and sexual identities be ‘undone’?” Although McIlvenny's coauthors all share his theoretical concerns at a general level, the chapters in TGS focus primarily on the means whereby gender and sexual categories are positively instantiated and indexed in talk; only a few explicitly engage how these modes of categorization might be resisted or transformed. Cameron & Kulick take their theorizing one step further, questioning the analytical and political utility of the concept of sexual identity itself.

This study focuses on the tensions around Portugal's language policies and citizens’ perceptions of their linguistic rights in the context of the current orthographic reform. Unlike other linguistic rights studies, this enquiry does not focus on endangered languages or linguistic minorities. Instead, there are three major ingredients that embody linguistic-rights claims by European Portuguese speakers: the right to be heard on orthographic reform in a democratic society, ownership and authenticity of the Portuguese language, and the need for protection against external (or, more specifically, Brazilian) hegemony. A critical discourse analysis approach to the arguments put forward by European Portuguese opponents of the orthographic reform shows that the ongoing discussion: (i) is neither about language nor about rights, but about competition; (ii) is based on linguistic dichotomies and recategorization of speakers and languages; (iii) manipulates the rhetoric of threat, endangerment, linguistic rights, and democracy; and (iv) opens up intra-linguistic and inter-variety spaces for conceptualizing linguistic rights claims. (Language ideological debate, public understanding, language planning, linguistic rights, orthographic reform)