Linguistic minority movements have long adopted dominant discourses linking language and community. Analysis of two sites of discursive production in francophone Canada (literacy centers and a call center workplace in Ontario) shows that current socioeconomic changes challenge those discourses. Language and community are uncoupled and redefined as commodities with exchange value in the globalized market for services and information. “Community” serves mainly to legitimize struggles for privileged access to newly commodified linguistic and cultural resources.

Tariana is spoken by about 100 people in the multilingual area of the Vaupés basin in northwest Amazonia (Brazil). Other languages spoken in the area are members of the East Tucanoan subgroup, with its most numerous representative, the Tucano language, rapidly gaining ground as a lingua franca. Also spoken are Makú languages; Baniwa, an Arawak language spoken on the fringes of the area and closely related to Tariana; and Portuguese, the national language. The area is known for its language group exogamy and institutionalized multilingualism, with its language being the badge of identity for each group. Language choice is motivated by power relationship and by status, and there are strict rules for code-switching. Inserting bits of other languages while speaking Tariana (“code-mixing”) has different consequences that mirror existing ethnic stereotypes. Code-mixing with Tucano is considered a “language violation”; using elements of Baniwa is considered funny, while mixing different Tariana dialects implies that one “cannot speak Tariana properly.” Overusing Portuguese is associated with the negative image of an Indian who tries to be better than his peers.

Feminist scholars have begun to ask how existing conceptual schemes and organizational structures in academic disciplines have excluded women and feminist ideas, and to provide suggestions for transformation. One strand of this work has been the exploration of how canons of thought are constructed in such fields as economics, sociology, and sociocultural anthropology. This article begins such an investigation for sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology by reviewing how gender correlates with publication and citation over a 35-year period (1965–2000) in five key journals, and in 16 textbooks published in the 1990s. It describes some marked differences in the publication of works by women and on gender in the five journals, as well as some significant differences in the degree to which men and women cite the work of women. It also considers how the rate of publication of articles on sex, gender, and women is correlated with publication of female authors. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of this study for changing institutional practices in our field.

This article revisits Labov's (1962, 1972a) germinal sociolinguistic work on Martha's Vineyard speech, providing a synchronic analysis of the /ay/ diphthong in words like right and time, and, in turn, a diachronic perspective on a sound change in progress. Labov observed that the first element of the /ay/ diphthong was raised in the speech of Martha's Vineyarders, particularly fishermen, and he correlated it with social factors like identity (i.e., local heritage) and resistance to summer visitors. The present authors provide a sociolinguistic analysis of /ay/ from a new set of data collected in a Martha's Vineyard speech community. The outcome suggests a change in the linguistic pattern observed by Labov, which the authors argue is linked to socio-economic restructuring and resulting ideological changes taking place on the island. The acoustic and social factors are analyzed using VARBRUL to show how /ay/ variation today patterns with various internal and external factors found to be salient in Labov's earlier study.

Critical discourse analysts are often criticized for interpreting linguistic data in political contexts, placing the data in an artificial environment motivated by political agendas rather than scientific inquiry, and thereby disregarding findings that would follow from a data-internal and more empirically grounded analysis. This article argues that critical discourse analysis may gain proficiency for social analysis by adopting concepts suitable for cultural and historical analysis of socialization, as found in Bourdieu. Application is demonstrated in a study of a job interview, with close linguistic analysis; close attention is given to the applicant by drawing on evaluations after the interview and on a retrospective interview with the applicant. It is proposed that a method combining linguistic and socio-historical analysis may offer advantages to critical discourse analysis, including a more systematic approach to text-external contexts and qualified, balanced perception of the social agent as a creative yet socially determined individual.

Friendship is studied as a culturally and contextually embedded entity. Focusing on the interactions between network marketers and their prospects, this article proposes four key central elements through which participants make sense of themselves when their identities are in transgression and conflict. Instead of being essentialist, the four elements of friendship – intimacy, control, trust, and positiveness – are highly interactional and dynamic elements that can be negotiated by participants in a conversation. It is argued that Grice's Cooperative Principle is valid, but this should be enhanced by participants' specific culture and prior experience. The notion of “face” in politeness models should be expanded in light of its dynamic characteristics in interaction.

This report extends earlier context-free treatments of turn-taking for conversation by describing the context-sensitive operation of the principal forms of addressing employed by current speakers to select next speakers. It first describes the context-specific limitations of gaze-directional addressing, and the selective deployment and more-than-addressing action regularly accomplished by address terms (most centrally, names). In addition to these explicit methods of addressing, this report introduces tacit forms of addressing that call on the innumerable context-specific particulars of circumstance, content, and composition to select a next speaker.

The spread of English has created a rich array of varieties, which are often grouped into a tripartite division: the ENL, ESL, and EFL of Quirk, or the inner-circle, outer-circle, and expanding-circle of Kachru. These varieties, especially ESL, differ among themselves in both form and function. It is often assumed in the literature that these varieties are autonomous systems of communication. This article challenges this assumption by showing that the innovative phonological features of one ESL variety, the vernacular English spoken in Singapore, cannot be analyzed without reference to native English. These change-in-progress features fall into two types: those that originate in phonemes, and those that originate in words. Social stigma associated with them poses a formidable barrier to their stabilization and diffusion, and consequently to their autonomization. Nonnative English is grammatically dependent on native English.

This article describes the development of a data bank of 25 male voices spanning the range from very gay-sounding to very straight-sounding, according to listener ratings. These ratings allowed the researchers to examine the effects of different discourse types (scientific, dramatic, and spontaneous) and listener groups (gay males vs. a mix of males and females of unknown sexual orientation) on how listeners perceived the voices. The effects of lexical and pragmatic content were explored by a comparison of spoken and written presentations of the same spontaneous speech samples. The effect of asking participants to rate the voices using different constructs (e.g., masculine/feminine vs. gay-sounding/straight-sounding) is discussed. The ultimate goal of this research program is to examine correlations between these ratings and a range of phonetic variables in order to shed light on the specific features to which listeners attend when judging whether a man's voice sounds gay or straight.

This article analyzes the specific pragmatics of an extremely asymmetrical example of market interaction between Spanish-speaking middlemen Mestizos and Hñahñu (Otomi) occasional sellers in the market of Ixmiquilpan, in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico, where Hñahñu is still spoken. The fine indications of interpersonal cross-cultural conflict found in the transcript (e.g., duration of turns, varied use of indexical terms by buyers to address sellers, and the timing of verbal performance) allow us to understand how interethnic, gender, and power differences operate in this specific setting, relating the global and local levels. Detailed analysis of one case demonstrates the validity of certain universal theories regarding the use of language and enables us to understand the unavoidable conditions of conversation in terms of their universal status vis-à-vis the use of language as the material expression of power, or symbolic violence

This article examines how so-called ordinary or casual conversational practices in the contemporary United States are constrained and structured in terms of where, when, how, and with whom people choose and are able to interact socially. The focus of analysis is the middle-class sociolinguistic practice of “coffeetalk” – a term borrowed from U.S. popular culture to signal the naturalized conflation of conversation with the commercialized consumption of coffee, space, and other commodities. The discussion of coffeetalk involves research methods including critical analyses of the marketing rhetoric of coffeehouse corporations; informal interviews with coffeehouse owners, employees and patrons; and the author's observations as a “native” participant in coffeetalk and other commodified modes of middle-class social interaction. By situating coffeetalk within its spatial, temporal and social contexts, this analysis challenges the claim of some sociolinguists that conversation is a “naturally occurring” phenomenon that is ontologically prior to other speech genres. A systematic investigation of the material and social dimensions of seemingly ordinary conversational practices demonstrates that these are inextricably implicated in the political, economic, and cultural-ideological processes of global capitalism, as symbolized by the increasingly ubiquitous Starbucks Coffee Company.

Numerous discourse markers have been examined in conversation and lecture contexts, but research is sparse on markers in the sermon genre and on the religious discourse communities in which sermons occur. This article examines discourse marker functions of sermonic expressions frequent in performed African American sermons (e.g. Amen, Hallelujah, Praise God). Functions identified include those of textual boundary marker, spiritual maintenance filler, rhythmic marker, and the infrequent call-response marker. Results support the importance of the role that culture (here, African oral tradition) plays in sermon performance.

This article examines gender and language in post-Soviet Ukraine, where language laws and turbulent socioeconomic changes are affecting language use. It discusses ideologies of gender, language, and ethnicity in Ukraine and assesses the significance of gender in shaping stances toward three competing languages, Ukrainian, Russian, and English. The analysis focuses on language ideologies and attitudes, based on survey and matched-guise language attitude test data. Two kinds of explanations for the gendered patterning are considered: first, how socialization and cultural ideologies of women's relationship to language shape the attitudes documented; and second, how political/economic forces (differences in possibilities for social power and social advancement linked to language use) lead men and women to benefit from different strategies in their use and valuation of linguistic capital. It is shown that, while sociocultural and political/economic forces reinforce each other in some cases, in others they contradict each other, with economic motives prevailing over cultural paradigms of traditionalism.

This article brings the study of language to the social phenomenon of gender-related violence as it is currently being dealt with in institutional settings. It investigates the social significance of 2nd person pronoun variation and alternation in 26 professional-victim interactions in two parallel institutions created to address violence against women in Brazil: a police station with an all-female staff, and a feminist crisis intervention center. A quantitative analysis of patterns of use is complemented by a qualitative analysis of the interactional strategies of 2nd person pronoun alternation in the two settings. Pronoun switching is innovatively analyzed under the theory of code alternation developed by Auer 1995. The qualitative analysis demonstrates how pronoun alternation functions as a contextualization cue in face-to-face interactions. In particular, it shows the different ways in which pronoun alternation is used to contextualize phenomena such as preference organization and changes in frames and footings, and locally to exercise power and/or solidarity.

From 1945 until 1987, the KMT (Nationalist) government enforced its strict Mandarin Language Policy in schools throughout Taiwan, and students were forbidden to speak local languages or dialects. Recent reversal of this policy allows schools to teach these formerly forbidden varieties. Despite some attention from scholars, it remains to explore the impact of these policies on successive generations of bilingual speakers. This study explores the perceptions of parents, grandparents, and young adults. The data show that school-based policies have an impact on family-based speaking practices. They also demonstrate the complex interplay between public and private histories in the development of linguistic ideologies and language as capital.

This article examines the interactive import of prosody from a perspective of participants' orientation to talk in interaction, taking advantage of data from institutional discourse to focus on the prosodic packaging of recurring turn sequences of the same discourse activity. The analysis focuses on the third slot of a ubiquitous three-part classroom discourse sequence, the IRF exchange (Sinclair & Coulthard 1975), a site in which teachers make repetitive feedback moves following student responses. Examination of more than 25 hours of classroom discourse and more than 300 third-turn teacher feedback types uncovered a systematic use of prosody for these teacher repetitions that coincides with a teacher's positive assessment of the student response. Further analysis shows that more complex prosodic packaging is used by teachers in their repetitive feedback turns to index other interactive functions.

The region of Murcia has historically been a transition area of southeastern Spain where many different cultures and civilizations have met, and the Spanish spoken in Murcia is a transitional variety sharing features with Valencian Catalan, Castilian, Aragonese, and Andalusian Spanish. Murcia is traditionally characterized as an eminently nonstandard-speaking region. The aim of this study is to analyze the possible relationship between the geolinguistic patterns of diffusion of standard Castilian Spanish over the Murcian territory and the increasing use of standard forms in this traditionally nonstandard area. For this purpose, the adoption of Castilian Spanish features by Murcian speakers is correlated with interaction and exposure to innovations. The real presence or absence of some degree of standardization as well as its intraregional variation indicates whether the detected geographical patterns of linguistic uniformity apply to Murcia.

This article argues that an androcentric Basque nationalist pedagogy is enacted in secondary schools in San Sebastian (Donostia), Spain. Textbooks present men as the exemplary Basque speakers and cultural agents by erasing women's contributions to Basque language and culture. Schools also contribute to a recursive language ideology, linking “authentic” ethnic identity, “naturalness,” and solidarity with vernacular Basque, of which the most pragmatically salient marker is the familiar form of address hi. Hi, in turn, indirectly indexes male speakers and masculinity, thereby creating an iconic relationship between authentic Basque identity, Basque culture, and masculinity. However, many women in Basque society have challenged this male privilege in various domains, thereby opening up the possibility of a Basque nation that embraces its female as well as its male members. As such, the Basque case has interesting implications for theorizing the relationships among language, gender, and nation.

According to some discussions concerning new information technologies and technologically enhanced communication, we are now in a revolution as profound as the printing press. The Internet is creating new kinds of meetingplaces and work areas and the possibilities of new types of relationships across time and space. This article reports on some ways that the Internet is shaping language practices in the Deaf community, with an interest in how new tools mediate and influence human behavior, including language and the organization of interaction. This includes the development and manipulation of a computer-mediated image of self and other, creativity and problem-solving in new communicative spaces, creating reciprocal perspectives, new participation frameworks, and specifics of language change. For the first time, deaf people can communicate using manual visual language, in many cases their native language, across space and time zones. This groundbreaking situation makes the Deaf community a particularly productive site for research into relationships between technological innovations and new communicative practices.

After nearly two centuries of contact with Europeans, the Māori language of New Zealand was, by the 1960s, threatened with extinction. Accompanying a movement for ethnic revival, a series of grassroots regeneration efforts that established adult, preschool, and autonomous school immersion programs has over the past two decades increased substantially the number of Māori who know and use their language, but this has not yet led to the reestablishment of natural intergenerational transmission. More recently, responding to growing ethnic pressures, the New Zealand government has adopted a Māori language policy and is starting to implement it. Seen in its widest social, political, and economic context, this process can be understood not as colonial language loss followed by postcolonial reversing language shift activities, but as the continuation of a long process of negotiation of accommodation between autochthonous Māori and European settlers.