This linguistic ethnographic study offers a nuanced pedagogical account of the Arabic term sumud, or ‘steadfastness’, through a sociolinguistic analysis of decolonial modes of expression among Palestinian youth in Israel. I reflect on events during the 2021 uprisings in East Jerusalem, when Palestinian youth within Israel took to the streets in solidarity with Palestinians in Jerusalem and Gaza. Considering the Israeli education system's denationalization of the Palestinian community within its borders, I examine how Palestinian political ideals cultivated outside the formal educational system open new possibilities for political organizing and expression. I reflect upon interviews with members of the Haifa Youth Movement and a Palestinian hip-hop artist and his lyrics. Engaging with Stroud's theorization of linguistic citizenship, I show how pedagogy of sumud as a linguistic citizenship practice opens new semiotic spaces for Palestinian youth in Israel to resist the erasure of their identity. (Linguistic citizenship, sumud pedagogy, Palestinian youth, colonized education)*

This study explores the link between stylized forms of language and the construction of social identities in performance in the Beijing hip hop community. It focuses on the indexical process by which rappers rely on existing characterological figures and local linguistic variables in Beijing Mandarin (i.e. rhotacized syllable finals, lenited retroflexes, interdentalized dental sibilants, and fronted palatals) to construct hip hop affiliated identities. A variationist analysis provides evidence of style-shifting between two generations of Beijing male rappers, who employ these socially salient linguistic features to different degrees, but always in a semiotically coherent package, in their performance. The analysis further demonstrates how the rappers maintain street credibility through a cultural alignment between hip hop and local social types. By examining the indexicality of these variables, the study highlights the interplay of hip hop ideology, local linguistic features, and local social types in stylistic practices and personae construction. (Hip hop, indexicality, iconicity, performance, Mandarin Chinese)*

The HOLLYWOOD sign is arguably the world's most famous language object. Emblematic of prestige and cultural capital, the sign can be found not just in Los Angeles, but in citations all over the world. Beginning with the history of its valorization, HOLLYWOOD is shown to emanate symbolic value through a set of enregistered semiotic features. Drawing upon a set of globally sourced citations of HOLLYWOOD, the circulation and stratified bundling of size, emplacement, alignment, typeface, and color indicates how the citation of language objects is mediated by political economy. A process of diffuse citation is further observed, in which the quotation of language features is not overt, but the source of emanation is still tangible, revealing HOLLYWOOD as the source of a global linguistic-semiotic register. As this register circulates in citations overt and diffuse, language objects are revealed as key sites for the reproduction of commodity values. (The Hollywood sign, language object, citation, enregisterment, global emblems, recontexualization)*

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)

The importance of presenting a united front has long since been an integral part of parenting advice. Despite the wealth of productive research on parent-child interaction, we have very little knowledge of how such a united front is assembled in situ, In the meantime, although few would question the benefit of collaboration, we are still in the process of understanding how collaboration is carried out in the micro-moments of interaction. This article contributes to the growing literature on parent-child interaction as well as that on collaboration in interaction by detailing how two parents achieve collaboration through merged speakership and merged recipiency. Findings may be applicable to a wide range of workspaces beyond the domestic sphere. (Family interaction, conversation analysis, collaboration)*

Evidential records of investigative interviews serve an important institutional purpose within the legal system in England and Wales. Academic scholars have long recognized that little institutional attention is paid to the transformation process that occurs when written records of the spoken are produced, nor to the potential impact this has on later interpretation by users of the records during the investigation of crimes and later in court. We analyse twenty-nine digitally recorded investigative interviews and their corresponding official written ‘Record of Taped/Videoed Interview’ (ROTI/ROVI) transcripts, taking an ethnomethodological, conversation analytic (CA) approach to examine the social actions that are transformed in this activity by comparing the audio record of police interview evidence to the written transcripts. The intended outcome of this work, within the wider project of which this forms a part, is to better understand this process within the legal system, and to incite improvements. (Investigative interview, transcription, entextualisation, conversation analysis)

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)*