Popular song lyrics constitute an exception to dominant, standard language ideologies of English: nonstandard grammatical forms are common, relatively unstigmatized, and even enregistered in the genre. This project uses song lyrics to test whether genre cues can shift linguistic expectations, influencing how speakers process morphosyntactic variants. In three self-paced reading experiments, participants read sentences from pop songs. Test sentences contained either ‘standard’ NPSG + doesn't or ‘nonstandard’ NPSG + don't. In Experiment 1, some participants were told that the sentences came from lyrics, while others received no context information. Experiment 2 eliminated other nonstandardisms in the stimuli, and Experiment 3 tested for the effect of stronger context information. Genre information caused participants to orient to the sentences differently, which partially—but not straightforwardly—mitigated surprisal at nonstandard don't. I discuss future directions for understanding the effects of context on sociolinguistic processing, which I argue can inform concepts like genre and enregisterment, and the processes underlying language attitudes. (Morphosyntactic variation, genre, invariant don't, language ideology, pop songs, experimental sociolinguistics, sentence processing)*

Mukbang is a Korean livestream where a host eats while interacting with viewers. The eater ‘speaks’ to the viewers while eating and the viewers ‘type’ to each other and to the eater through a live chat room. Using interactional sociolinguistics along with insights from conversation analysis (CA) studies, the present study examines how sociable eating is jointly and multimodally achieved in mukbang. Analyzing sixty-seven mukbang clips, I find that mukbang participants coordinate their actions through speech, written text, and embodied acts, and that this coordination creates involvement and, by extension, establishes both community and social agency. Specifically, recruitments are the basic joint action of eating, as participants, who are taking turns, assume footings of the recruit and the recruiter. The host embodies viewers’ text recruitments through embodied animating and puppeteering. As in street performance, the viewers often offer voluntary donations, and the host shows entertaining gratitude in response. (Mukbang, footing, recruitments, agency, involvement, constructed action, multimodal interaction, computer-mediated discourse)*

This study of language crossing moves away from the scenes of multi-ethnic heteroglossia that have dominated the research, and turns instead to a setting affected by major conflict where the language of the traditional enemy has been introduced to secondary schools as part of a reconciliation initiative. This generates a radically different view of crossing and the environment in which it emerges: schooling counts more than popular culture; inter-generational links matter as much as peer relations; and ‘technical redoing’ is a more important key for crossing than ‘make believe’, ‘contests’, or ‘ceremonials’ (Goffman 1974). With a very different profile of this kind, crossing retains and extends its significance, pointing to a sociolinguistic practice that also occurs in official sites struggling with a legacy of violence and acute division. (Crossing, conflict legacy, language learning, classrooms, keying)*

Starting from the idea that all social life is characterized by contact between those who do not have the same trajectories of socialization, this article draws on insights from work on narrative, normativity, and social value to examine how contact is discursively policed. Building on scholarship on diversity talk and translingualism I propose the concept contact discourse to refer to the discursive work that constructs and evaluates those who inhabit contact zones. While both streams of scholarship cover the discursive policing of social life to greater and lesser extents, they cover very different participation and authorization frameworks. Contact discourse and the three associated terms—models of contact, contact commentary, and contact talk—highlight the importance of participation and authorization frameworks for understanding the policing of social life in contact zones. My empirical focus is on discursive data from television, social media, interviews, and everyday talk. (Contact, discourse, diversity talk, normativization, translingualism, value)*

This special issue was born out of a conversation initiated at a panel organized by two of us at the ninth biannual meeting of the International Gender and Language Association (IGALA), held at City University of Hong Kong in May 2016. The principal goal of the panel was to stimulate an academic discussion on the role of normativity and antinormativity in language, gender, and sexuality research in response to a series of critical interventions in cultural studies regarding some of the tenets underpinning queer theory (see Wiegman 2012; Penney 2014; Wiegman & Wilson 2015). It was our belief that sociolinguistics—with its focus on situated interpretations of social practice—has much to contribute, both theoretically and empirically, to these debates within cultural studies. This special issue is an initial attempt at articulating what such a contribution would be.

This article draws on data from an ethnographic project to explore the ways in which migrant micro-entrepreneurs exploit mobile messaging apps to co-construct mobile chronotopes: dynamic configurations of time and space negotiated by geographically separated participants, who draw on different contexts and frames of understanding. Analysis of mobile messages by two couples—Chinese butchers in Birmingham and Polish shop-owners in London—informed by interview and interactional data collected at work and home, suggests they discursively negotiate and exploit multiple chronotopic layers, creating complex intersections between virtual and physical spaces in everyday interactions. We focus on the role that multilingual and multimodal semiotic resources play in co-constructing mobile chronotopes. In particular, we explore critical junctures at which communicative expectations are challenged, rendering mobile chronotope negotiation visible. Our concept of the mobile chronotope has implications for both the theorisation of mobile phone communication and understanding how chronotopes function in contemporary transnational migrant discourse. (Chronotope, migrant entrepreneur, mobile messaging, transnational migration)*

Language is a means of communication but it functions as much more than this in social life. In emergencies and disasters, it can also be a matter of life and death. Language barriers and effective communication in disaster contexts (i.e. distributing critical disaster information and warnings) are the central concern in current disaster research, practice, and policy. However, based on the data drawn from qualitative interviews with linguistic minority immigrants and refugees in Canterbury, New Zealand and Miyagi, Japan, I argue that linguistic minorities confront unique disaster vulnerability partly due to linguicism—language-based discrimination at multiple levels. As linguicism is often compounded by racism, it is not properly addressed and analyzed, using the framework of language ideology and power. This article therefore introduces the concept of disaster linguicism, employing Pierre Bourdieu's concept of symbolic violence, to explore linguistic minorities’ complex disaster experiences in the 2010–2011 Canterbury and Tohoku disasters. (Disaster linguicism, language barriers, language ideologies)*

The rise of India's global economy has reinforced a perception of English as a language of sexual modernity within the expanding middle classes. This article explores this perception in the multilingual humor of Hindi-speaking Delhi youth marginalized for sexual and gender difference. Their joking routines feature the Sikh Sardarji, a longstanding ethnic figure often caricatured as circulating in modernity but lacking the English competence to understand modernity's semiotics. Reflective of the economic restructuring that ushered in the millennium, the humor supports a normative progress narrative that prioritizes an ethnically unmarked urban middle class. At the same time, the lesbian, bisexual, and transgender youth who tell these jokes—still criminalized under Section 377 when this fieldwork was conducted—shift this narrative by positioning sexual knowledge at modernity's forefront. The analysis reveals how sexual modernity—here viewed as constituted in everyday interaction through competing configurations of place, time, and personhood—relies on normativity even while defining itself against it. (Chronotope, ethnic humor, formulaic jokes, globalization, Hindi-English, Hinglish, media, middle class, normativity, sexual modernity, temporality)*

This article explores the roles that language and the body play in the iconization of cross-modal personae (see Agha 2003, 2004). Focusing on a community of radical drag queens in San Francisco, I analyze the interplay of visual presentation and acoustic dimensions of /s/ in the construction of the fierce queen persona, which embodies an extreme, larger-than-life, and anti-normative type of femininity. Taking data from transformations—conversations during which queens visually transform from male-presenting into their feminine drag personae—I explore the effect of fluid visual presentation on linguistic production, and argue that changes in both the linguistic and visual streams increasingly invoke qualia (see Gal 2013; Harkness 2015) projecting ‘harshness’ and ‘sharpness’ in the construction of fierce femininity. I argue that personae like the fierce queen become iconized through rhematization (see Gal 2013), a process in which qualic congruences are construed and constructed across multiple semiotic modalities. (Iconization, rhematization, qualia, sociophonetics, gender, personae, drag queens)*

This article examines how people complain about technology. Using discourse analysis, we inspect sixteen hours of video-recorded focus-group interviews and focused one-on-one discussions where technology was topicalized. We investigate these conversations paying attention to (i) features of language and its situated delivery, including emphasis, word choice, metaphor, and categorizations; and (ii) how these accomplish social actions. We show how interactants use narratives of complaint-like activities about hypothetical categories of people and confessions of their own complainable participation to accomplish a ‘bemoaning’ speech act that manages competing affiliations, demands, and disagreements to construct reasonable moral identities in the situated interaction. By engaging in specific micro-level discursive practices in interaction, participants produce and reproduce what new technologies ‘mean’ to them and for contemporary society. This shows how important it is to examine opinions as situated actions rather than as simple facts about what people believe. (Complaints, accounts, stance, technology, discourse analysis, identity)*

We present a quantitative study of the linguistic and social factors conditioning the use of grammatical gender with reference to women, focusing on variation in the debates of the French parliament. Two prime ministers of similar political leanings regulated the use of feminine g-gender through identical policies in 1986 and 1998, with no effect on parliamentary speech in the first instance, and dramatic success in the second. We claim that the latter outcome resulted from changes in gender ideologies between these two dates. The 1990s saw the emergence of a new social type for female politicians, which only feminine g-gender can construct. We hypothesize that the 1998 policy was effective because it strengthened existing associations between feminine g-gender and a persona, while the original policy tried to build on ideological structure that was not widespread. We conclude that linguistic prescriptions are only successful if they build on existing ideologies. (Linguistic prescription, gender ideology, grammatical gender, ideological structure)*

This article questions queer theory's investment in antinormativity and anti-identitarianism by applying a queer multimodal discourse analytic approach to the ethnographic context of queer, bilingual Mexicans/Latinxs in the US Southwest. The article explores the complexity of ways that norms are taken up and resisted (or not) in discourse, with particular attention to the activist use of discourses about community and identity. A close analysis of several texts illuminates how language practices and social practices—as seen, for example, in advertising strategies, participation in annual LGBTQ Pride festivals, and activism surrounding the undocuqueer movement—become invested with social meaning among queer Mexicans/Latinxs. (Antinormativity, queer theory, bilingual, sexual identity, community, Latinx, jotería)*

Listeners often have the intuition that the speech of broadcast news reporters somehow ‘sounds different’; previous literature supports this observation and has described some distinctive aspects of newscaster register. This article presents two studies further describing the characteristic properties and functions of American English newscaster speech, focusing specifically on prosody. In the first, we investigate the production of newscaster speech. We describe the measurable differences in pitch, speed, intensity, and melodic features between newscaster and conversational speech, and connect those traits to perceptions of authority, credibility, charisma, and related characteristics. In the second, we investigate the perception of newscaster speech. Our experiments demonstrate that listeners can distinguish newscaster from conversational speech given only prosodic information, and that they use a subset of the newscasters’ distinguishing features to do so. (News, prosody, discourse registers, speech perception, credibility, authority)*

Contrary to Labov's principle of style shifting, studies in language obsolescence portray speakers of dying languages as ‘monostylistic’, a characterization questioned here. Variationist methodology is adopted in a context of gradual language death. By combining quantitative and interactional analyses of data from older, younger, and new speakers of Francoprovençal in France and Switzerland, the article considers (a) to what extent variability in language obsolescence differs from that found in ‘healthy’ languages, and (b) how innovations might spread through communities speaking threatened languages characterized as ‘monostylistic’ and lacking overt normative infrastructure. It is argued that style variation (not monostylism) emerges from linguistic decay: among more fluent speakers, a categorical rule of /l/-palatalization before obstruents becomes underspecified, rendering palatalization available for strategic use. Among new speakers, novel palatal variants form part of an emergent sociolinguistic norm. The study offers fresh insights on the origins of sociolinguistic variation with implications for variationist theory. (Language obsolescence, language death, language variation and change, style variation, new speakers)*

Theories of social capital hold that strong interpersonal relationships can be leveraged to facilitate information sharing, gain trust, and strengthen group solidarity. Thus, it is often predicted that international workers are disadvantaged in these areas because they lack established social ties. Using data from disagreements between American interns and their colleagues in Japanese companies, this study critically examines this prediction by illustrating some ways participants use socially constructed representations of intercultural ideologies in ways that facilitate similar outcomes and substitute for their lack of relational histories. Specifically, these representations temporarily reverse flows of information, resist restrictions stemming from perceived lack of trust, and create shared humor that helps redefine in-group boundaries. By using a formal social capital model to interpret these results, this study helps position socially constructed representations of interculturality within a broader theoretical account of the potentially many forms of symbolic ‘capital’ that enable action. (Social capital, interculturality, disagreements, workplace, social identity)*

The relationship between gender and advertising has been discussed extensively. Scholarly works have often emanated from the West and have principally centred on visual advertisements, rather than radio (which plays a critical role in the lives of many Africans). Most of these studies have centred on how women are represented in traditionally stereotyped ways. However, recent studies have shown decreases in these stereotypes as ways of responding to changes in gender roles. But do gender-related adverts from Africa reflect the changing statuses and roles of African women (some of which challenge traditional gender stereotypes)? This article investigates how women are represented in Ghanaian radio commercials and indicates whether such representations reproduce, reinforce, or challenge feminine practices. An analysis of thirty-seven gender-related adverts reveals that, although women are rarely represented as challenging gender stereotypes, they are sometimes represented as using certain traditionally stereotyped roles as sources of ‘power’ to challenge other stereotypes. (Advertising, gender stereotypes, women, radio, Ghana, ideals of femininity)*

This article explores the semiotic spaces occupied by organizations working against discrimination in Sweden. Expressions of identity, norm critique, and political goals are studied in relation to word production and language policy and planning. The study departs from interviews with representatives from three organizations within the hbtqi, antiracist, and disability movements. Other resources connected to them have also been analyzed, such as glossaries. Theoretically, this study draws on Yuri Lotman's concept of semiospheres, allowing the analysis to weigh in the whole semiotic process, including meaning production, policy work, and concrete word production. This approach completes an analysis of indexical orders. The results show that (a) organizations are aware of the importance of linguistic choices, (b) when new concepts and words are spread to the public, tension can arise and sometimes objections, and (c) word meanings change when used in public discourse. (Language policy and planning, semiosphere, indexical order, hbtqi, antiracism, disability, discrimination)

This article examines how communicative resources affect the construction of credible texts and identities in a public debate on Australia's treatment of a refugee. It centres on two key written statements—one from the Immigration Minister, and another from a Somali refugee. The analysis is divided into four levels, exploring the parties’ respective linguistic, material, identity, and platform resources, and how these impact their statements’ creation and reception, and their participation in discourse creation more generally. The article finds that there are inequalities on all four resource levels that largely undermine the refugee's ability to present a credible text and identity and challenge mainstream discourse on refugees. The article demonstrates how a multi-level analysis of communicative resources can challenge assumptions about participation and uncover inequalities invisible in the prevailing discourse. (Asylum, Australia, communicative resources, discourse, intercultural communication, media, power, refugee)*

Recent approaches to multilingualism, such as translanguaging, emphasize the porous, fluid, and hybrid nature of language use. This article intends to show, through an example of a local language debating competition in Central Java, that culturally emblematic performances tend to create monolanguaging spaces, due to their monolingual focusing on certain language varieties that are iconic to local ethnolinguistic identity. Monolanguaging spaces are language ideological spaces in which speakers project an idealized performance of their ethnolinguistic identity. Ethnographic observation shows that the performance of monolanguaging spaces involves the erasure of speakers’ multilingual repertoires and translanguaging practices, in accordance to the language ideology surrounding the hegemonic prestigious language variety and in accordance to the local norms of status or power-based social interaction. Attending to monolanguaging spaces reveal it as a performance accomplished through discursive work and power relations, involving the misrecognition of its connection and dissonance to multilingual repertoires and practices. (Language ideology, erasure, translanguaging, monolanguaging space, performance, ethnolinguistic identity, Javanese)*

This article investigates how naturalized models of hegemonic masculinity affect race and sexuality in the James Bond film series. Through close analysis of film dialogue and paralinguistic cues, the article examines how the sexualities of East Asian female and male characters are constructed as oversexed and undersexed, respectively. The analysis therefore affirms Connell's (1995) conception of white heterosexual masculinity as exemplary: East Asian characters are positioned not only as racial Others, but as bodies upon which Bond's heterosexual masculinity is reflected and affirmed as normative and, by extension, ideal. In this way, race is curiously invoked to ‘explain’ sexuality, and Bond's unmarked white masculinity becomes the normative referent for expressions of heterosexual desire. By showing how the sexuality of East Asian characters is typecast as non-normative, the article gestures toward the possibility of theorizing racialized performances of heterosexuality as queer. (East Asia, James Bond, sexuality, race, masculinity, femininity, normativity, film)*