Human language is increasingly written rather than just spoken, primarily due to the proliferation of digital technology in modern life. This trend has enabled the creation of generative artificial intelligence (AI) trained on corpora containing trillions of words extracted from text on the internet. However, current language theory inadequately addresses digital text communication’s unique characteristics and constraints. This paper systematically analyzes and synthesizes existing literature to map the theoretical landscape of digitized language. The evidence demonstrates that, parallel to spoken language, features of written communication are frequently correlated with the socially constructed demographic identities of writers, a phenomenon we refer to as “digital accents.” This conceptualization raises complex ontological questions about the nature of digital text and its relationship to social identity. The same line of questioning, in conjunction with recent research, shows how generative AI systematically fails to capture the breadth of expression observed in human writing, an outcome we call “homogeneity-by-design.” By approaching text-based language from this theoretical framework while acknowledging its inherent limitations, social scientists studying language can strengthen their critical analysis of AI systems and contribute meaningful insights to their development and improvement.

This paper starts by observing that an old loan word from English, the previously unstudied Finnish response particle jep ‘yep’, has recently become more frequent and gained new interactional uses. Using Conversation Analysis as a method, the paper outlines the contemporary uses of jep in messaging interaction collected in 2015–2023. It suggests that jep does not merely function as an affirmative answer, as suggested in contemporary dictionaries. Instead, it occurs in agreement and affiliation-relevant contexts, and it is used to confirm the validity of the previous speaker’s point of view and to construct it as an opinion that is shared between the participants. Although the article focuses on synchronic analyses, it also presents observations on the changes in the use of jep, paving the way for a more diachronically oriented study on the particle.

This study reflects on Japan's language policy, focusing on the government‑led proposals implemented in 2006, which suggested replacing loanwords with Japanese equivalents, known as Gairaigo Iikae Teian ‘proposals for replacing loanwords’. By investigating English loanwords, this article explores the impact of English on Japanese vocabulary, while providing insights into the practical implementation of the government-led language policy in Japan for a broader global audience. It also clarifies that the objective of the proposals was not to strictly regulate the use of English loanwords but to offer suggestions, with replacement as one strategy to improve communication, especially when disseminating information through government agencies and media organisations. Through a quantitative investigation on the usage of English loanwords in the media, the results reveal that the overall number of media articles containing the loanwords in the proposed list has increased over the last 30 years. The findings also confirm that loanwords and their Japanese equivalents are not in competition, with one replacing the other. Instead, their usage exhibits a parallel trend in both frequency and increase rates.

Adults rate the speech of children assigned male at birth (AMAB) and assigned female at birth (AFAB) as young as 2.5 years of age differently on a scale of definitely a boy to definitely a girl (Munson et al., 2022), despite the lack of consistent sex dimorphism in children’s speech production mechanisms. This study used longitudinal data to examine the acoustic differences between AMAB and AFAB children and the association between the acoustic measures and perceived gender ratings of children’s speech. We found differences between AMAB and AFAB children in two acoustic parameters that mark gender in adult speech: the spectral centroid of /s/ and the overall scaling of resonant frequencies in vowels. These results demonstrate that children as young as 3 years old speak in ways that reflect their sex assigned at birth. We interpret this as evidence that children manipulate their speech apparatus volitionally to mark gender through speech.

Bollywood films, the highly commercial films by Indian producers for Indian audiences, have always been Hindi-dominant, and despite the increased incorporation of English over time, the speech of urban elite main characters remains Hindi matrix. This is at odds with the code-switching patterns of urban elites in other Indian media, such as chat shows, and spoken conversation, where switching among such speakers is often English dominant. Young urban elites may use English in isolation; their Bollywood equivalents sometimes do so also, but always with standard syntax. In this article we show how for Bollywood films, English without code-switching typically occurs in the speech of anglicised minorities such as Goan Catholics; furthermore, their English is indexed by the morphosyntactic features of Indian English. This contrasts with usage outside film, where Indian English features have been shown to be broadly distributed. This conservatism of Bollywood speech reflects conflicting attitudes towards an endonormative variety of English within India.

This paper explores metalinguistic social media discussions on the variation of Finnish third-person singular pronouns in reference to nonhuman animals. Finnish uses two third-person singular pronouns: hän and se. In standardized Finnish, hän takes exclusively human and se nonhuman referents, but in colloquial speech, the difference between hän and se is not based on the human/nonhuman distinction. I examine the discursive construction of the human–animal relationship in social media discussions about the use of hän in reference to nonhuman animals, as well as the intersection between discourses on the human–animal relationship and language ideologies through a critical perspective. Two major discourses are identified: one centres on equality and the other emphasizes the differentiation and hierarchy of species. Both discourses are closely connected to language ideologies, which shape and are shaped by views on the status of nonhuman animals in human society.

This article identifies factors that affect local dialect recognition in the north of the East Midlands, England. Central to the argument is the local belief in a ‘scale of northern-ness’: the general impression that accent moves geographically across the East Midlands, transitioning gradually southwards from northern to southern English. This theory bears similarities with Upton's description of the Midlands region as a ‘transition zone’ (2012, 267). Two dialect recognition tasks were completed by three age groups of respondents based primarily in Chesterfield, North East Derbyshire. The results indicate that Sheffield voices were the most recognisable to the Chesterfield audience, perhaps because they differed from the East Midland voices in the sample. Respondents' ‘dialect image’ (Inoue 1999, 162) of East Midland voices led to some errors being made, with the key belief in the north of this region that ‘north is better’.

Maps are important in many areas of linguistics, especially dialectology, sociolinguistics, typology, and historical linguistics, including for visualizing regional patterns in the distribution of linguistic features and varieties of language. In this hands-on tutorial, we introduce map making for linguistics using R and the popular package ggplot2. We walk the reader through the process of making maps using both typological data, based on the World Atlas of Language Structures, and dialect data, based on large corpora of language data collected from German and American social media platforms. This tutorial is intended to be of use to anyone interested in making maps of linguistic data, and more widely to anyone wanting to learn about mapping in R.

Multicultural Toronto English (MTE) is a register found in Toronto, Canada, associated with racialized youth. The ongoing enregisterment of MTE takes place, in part, through metadiscourse on social media, which disseminates the register to a wider audience. This article examines online metadiscursive engagement with representations of MTE. We consider how audiences take up, receive and recontextualize MTE through metadiscourse across grassroots and institutional media platforms. We argue that audience engagement with pop-cultural representations of language is a critical driving force of enregisterment and register change.

Many of the most popular comedy performances are rich in non-standard linguistic features of English. This article addresses how dialect contributes to the humor in comedy performances, and how humorous dialect performance leads to the enregisterment of a dialect. It applies enregisterment theory to online clips of three live comedy performances by Stephen Buchanan (‘How to survive Glasgow’), Ali G (‘Harvard Commencement Speech 2004’) and Riaad Moosa (‘I have a weird accent’), and one clip from the British sitcom PhoneShop (2009–13). All four dialectal performances showcase the metalinguistic activity central to enregisterment processes. However, in each performance, the dialect also fulfils a dedicated function in the construction of humor, ranging from building audience rapport to the subversion of a (linguistic) status quo. It is argued that just as dialect can help performers to be funnier, humor can help a dialect to become more enregistered.

This study examines the representation of Jamaican Creole and cultural stereotypes about Jamaicans in the BBC Three sketch Jamaican Countdown, produced for the British show Famalam. The parody, which sharply contrasts with the original intellectual and orderly game show Countdown, employs features of Jamaican Creole for comedic effect. However, it has faced criticism for reinforcing cultural stereotypes about Jamaicans. This article focuses on the linguistic features – phonetic, morphosyntactic and lexical – used in the sketch. Through qualitative methods, it examines these features and investigates how linguistic and visual elements contribute to the portrayal of cultural stereotypes. The results show that Jamaican Countdown introduces complex indexical relationships by enriching the portrayal of Jamaicans in popular culture but also perpetuating stereotypes. The sketch contrasts the original British game show’s formality with a sexualized, unruly Jamaican parody, which exhibits various semiotic resources to both parody and reinforce cultural stereotypes.