This article analyses an environmentalist activity known as forest therapy in a suburb of Tokyo and formulates qualia as a rhematic textual process semiotically calibrating an encounter with forests in such a way that its effects seem raw, natural, or “unmediated.” In particular, it ethnographically demonstrates how a distinctive cooccurrence style of Japanese language use, involving ideophones and euphonic forms with various diminutive effects during forest therapy interactions, becomes a perceivable object of the senses qua discursive form, whose effects—which are not natural but naturalizing—further equips participants in forest therapy sessions to apperceive and discursively specify the attributes of other perceivable things, now taken to be “immediate” sensuous truths, through a process whose effects Peirce captions as qualia, or facts of firstness. The article further reveals that such a naturalized—and thus therapeutic—encounter with forests is figurated through various rhematic, text-metrical patterns that rely on specific discursive resources, which cumulatively diagram agents’ affective attunements to a nonhuman forest world, while enacting transspecies engagement with animals and “fictionalizing” the (lost) animistic linkage in the Anthropocene with “wildness” through their bodies as phatic nexus.

In the southern Dutch province of North Brabant, local dialect use is declining sharply. Dialect leveling and loss lead to convergence to standard Dutch, and simultaneously to divergence that is reflected in increasing variation, that is, hyperdialectisms. This can be clearly observed in morphosyntactic features such as the adnominal masculine gender suffix -e(n). The current study investigates the sociolinguistic enregisterment of this suffix in 336 multimodal “tiles” with Brabantish aphorisms and jokes on Instagram. Based on digital and interview data, it shows how linguistic structure, situated use, and metalinguistic awareness (i.e., Silverstein’s total linguistic fact) are constantly interrelated. It is argued that the gender suffix acquires indexical social meaning at the expense of grammatical function, as its (hyperdialectal) use becomes associated with and recognizable for a place-based identity (“Brabantishness”). This research offers insights into how this meaning-making process is enhanced by co-occurring linguistic and nonlinguistic resources in mediated “languagecultural” practices.

In proposing a “both-and” semiotics of intersectionality, this special issue responds to recent timely studies of white supremacy, anti-Blackness, settler supremacy, and other oppressive systems undertaken by linguistic anthropologists and other critical scholars of language. Contributors to this issue turn our attention toward two pressing concerns that are at stake in the continued theorization of raciolinguistics: First, we insist that the conaturalization of language and race is flexible and expansive, not reductive, narrow, or epiphenomenal. Second, we situate our projects at what has until now been a point of breakdown in raciolinguistic discussions by examining and theorizing raciolinguistic ordering in situations that are reflexively positioned as lying beyond the white settler colonial.

The role played by the artist and the nature of art are two of the most enduring and controversial themes in Western philosophy. Indeed, if we were to trace the history of aesthetics, it seems evident that the role of the artist and the effects of art have been called into question as history crosses over into another age. My concern in this study has to do with the function of art and the artist throughout Western history, which is not so much an emancipatory movement as it is a crisis of transcendence. Likewise, the secular intellectual dogmatism that, in our age, treats literary texts as open documents of linguistics analysis without consideration for the author’s intention is less a democratic endeavor than it is a crisis of religious belief.

English in Singapore occupies an ambivalent status as both global bridge and threat to local “cultural values” (Tan 2017). English is also constructed as threatened by Singlish, or Singaporean Colloquial English (Wee 2018). This article first elaborates the historical-institutional production of a covert raciolinguistic community—“Caucasian” English speakers—whose speech ideologically contrasts with Singaporeans’ “non-native” English. It then analyzes a crowdsourced self-help column, “English as It Is Broken,” and participant observation at a Singlish awareness class. I argue that the figure of the native-English-speaking foreigner (by default white and, increasingly, American) continues to anchor what counts as “Good English” and rescales intersectional self- and other evaluations of Singaporeans’ linguistic deficiency. Good English thus invites aspirational investments in whiteness-as-position (a superordinate position in global, racializing hierarchies) but remains a target that Singaporeans are cast as forever failing to meet due to their nonwhite identities (not “being” white).

Luxembourg is characterized by a personal language policy in which Luxembourgish, French, German, and German Sign Language are recognized and enregistered as national (Luxembourgish) and administrative languages. Pivotal in such a policy development was the enregisterment of a Luxembourgish voice throughout the nineteenth century as either a bilingual French/German voice (subsuming Luxembourgish under German) or as a gallicized German voice through conflicting ideologies of personhood and nationhood. Through an analysis of policy, media, and linguistics texts from 1830 to 1896, I argue that cross-event linkages between these texts allow for the identification of two distinct ethnometapragmatics. These typify a Luxembourgish voice and enregister the Luxembourgish language as a highly disputed emblem of nationhood. These ethnometapragmatics were speech events that solidified into pathways that characterized nineteenth-century Luxembourg until 1896, when Caspar Mathias Spoo gave a speech in Parliament whose effects slightly shifted these two pathways by redefining the high/low register division through an ideology of democratization.

Singapore’s postcolonial multiracialism is held together by state policies that categorize its citizens into four major race groups ordered according to their size: Chinese, Malay, Indian, and Others. This postcolonial framework—with its colonial logics of statal race management and categorization—governs social life in Singapore. Recent race talk has birthed a contentious term—Chinese privilege—that has found its way into common parlance and is now deployed as an explanation for overt and covert racism. “Chinese privilege,” continuous from White privilege, may be understood as the belief that sociopolitical advantages are accorded to those racialized as Chinese. We take cues from Ahmed’s (2004b) notion of “stickiness” to consider how (1) Western ideas of racialized power rooted in Whiteness are reconfigured in postcolonial Singapore and (2) the processes of racialization and racial categorization are uncritically reproduced in invocations of Chinese privilege as censure and confessional. We interpret the notion of sticky raciolinguistics as the inextricability of race-language conaturalization from antecedent centers of White-settler colonial thought.

This article focuses on the nexus between political discourse and contemporary concerns about the arbitration of truth to argue that Trump’s way of using speech about speech (i.e., his metapragmatic discourse) resembles the manipulation tactic commonly called gaslighting. Based on examples drawn from 2020 (i.e., White House press conferences and electoral presidential debates), I explore Trump’s metapragmatic gaslighting both as an epistemic tactic for the manipulation of information and as an effective style of political self-presentation. By analyzing specific instances of Trump’s metapragmatic commentaries that blatantly contradict shared pragmatic principles for the interpretation of utterances’ illocutionary force and denotational content, I show how Trump is able to present himself as a champion of semantic and moral candor and simultaneously promote a highly personalist view of the meaning-making process. In so doing, I also propose a metapragmatic approach to the epistemological and political predicaments posed by the “post-truth” epistemic regime.

This study focuses on a series—Of Beautiful Arms—by Israeli artist Zohar Tal Inbar. The paintings were created a few years after the artist’s son was released from the army, diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It includes figurative paintings, most of them focusing on the body of a young man—a soldier. The methodology combines visual analysis of the paintings with interviews with the artist. Findings have shown that the series embodies double estrangement—thematic and stylistic. The artist has used intertextuality to portray soldier images borrowed from Greek and Roman mythology and from Christianity. In terms of style, the paintings portray realistic figures against abstract backgrounds that distance them from Israeli reality while leaving them recognizable as Israeli soldiers. Using double estrangement allowed the artist to express a feminist counterposition—that of a woman refusing to passively accept the role of an uncritically supportive soldier’s mother. In addition, she has explored the soldier’s fragility by pointing to PTSD, a common phenomenon among military personnel, which in Israeli discourse still suffers a disfranchised status.

Advancing a raciosemiotics (Smalls 2020) of appropriation, this article examines what happens when raciolinguistically charged signs circulate and are taken up in a context different to their production. Based on face-to-face and digital ethnography of K-pop fans in Mexico, this study presents a multimodal semiotic analysis of fans’ metapragmatic discourses and social media practices. I show how fans orient to the female K-pop idol, a mediatized figure of personhood (Agha 2005; Hiramoto and Kang 2017) indexical of hegemonic cosmopolitan femininity but simultaneously an exotic racialized Other in many non-Korean contexts. My examination of fan discourses and performance on social media treats the characterological figure of the female K-pop idol as a desirable, aspirational racial other for Mexican fans, while attending to the sociohistorical specificities of Asian racialization in the context of Mexico. The characterological figure is shaped by, and must interact with, local racial ideologies. My analysis suggests that such performances allow fans to differentiate themselves from other Mexican youth by demonstrating their knowledge of intra-Asian differences. Moreover, they are able to fashion neoliberal and queer subjectivities, albeit conditionally, through their indexical approximation of K-pop idols.

This article presents a digital ethnographic study of amateur entrepreneurs who sell cosmetic samples primarily in an online marketplace in Hong Kong to illustrate how they use language to to create added value in their unconventional beauty product niche. It examines how these people cross over to an authoritative and professional brand persona by reappropriating product description of the original products to introduce their own beauty sample products to a wide audience, forming interdiscursive links between the original brand and their own business. These linguistic and semiotic resources afforded by the online platforms help create extra value in the normally not-so-expensive cosmetic sample products being (re)sold by ordinary, unauthorized people. The marketing decision and invested labor of these amateur entrepreneurs display their neoliberal selfhoods, illustrating the precarious nature of their online business. This study offers unique insight into current research about the authenticity and commodification of language.

In Turkey, tea is a near-universally consumed beverage that also operates as a salient moral and political sign in social life. This article describes how tea functions as a “medium of value” in the country, circulating as both a physical commodity and a multivalent sign vehicle that is closely linked in popular imagination to modern modes of egalitarian sociability and the formation of Turkey’s postwar multiparty democracy. In describing the semiotic ideologies that inform tea’s uptake as a sign and its place in Turkey’s modern public culture, the article also traces the historical-material processes that have made tea into both a symbolic model of communal solidarity and a salient sign of national difference—a contested semiotic medium of representation that informs popular discourses on public virtue and democratic politics and that is prominently mobilized in divergent public making projects in contemporary Turkey and North (“Turkish”) Kurdistan.

Among linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists interested in multimodal communication, much attention has been paid to the motor activity of the hands. Psychologists have treated the hands as a window onto the mind and as a facilitator of thought. Linguists have treated the hands as articulators of linguistic signs, and linguistic anthropologists have treated the hands as an integral part of broader, interacting semiotic processes. This essay builds on these approaches by attending to DeafBlind observations about the communicative potential of the hands. Hands are what you touch when you meet someone, and their texture, temperature, and movements remain available to you over the course of an interaction. From the hands' qualities, the rest of the person and their environment can be inferred. From this perspective, the hands appear not only as a window onto the mind, as a facilitator of thought, or as an articulator of signs, but also as a kind of appendage to the self—like cilia, left out in the world to register the dynamics of social life. This suggests new methodological possibilities for analyzing the motoric activity of hands as a sociocultural and biosemiotic problem.

Previous critical work on language ideologies surrounding English in postcolonial spaces has shown how perduring colonial logics are repurposed into contemporary discourses of value and class (Reyes 2017; Tupas 2019). This article builds on this work by examining a language-policing incident in an urban Pakistani café in which the owners link modernity, wealth, and professionalism to Western English competency. I further interrogate this interaction using a lens informed by organizational studies and decolonial work on structural whiteness to show how linguistic hegemonies working at the intersections of race, class, and organizational hierarchy in so-called postcolonial spaces can still embody and promote Anglocentric ideologies. Finally, in understanding how language policing works as a scalar act, this article ends with a discussion of how actors in positions of power can appeal to conflicting notions of scale to mask their larger ideologies as part of standard organizational practices, divorced from any larger context.