This study explores how during the initial outbreak of COVID-19 in Taiwan, mask-wearing emerged as a semiotic register in health communication. Focusing on enregisterment (Agha 2007), I analyze interactional recordings of press conferences by the Taiwanese government, Chinese language lessons offered to international students, and conversations at a convenience store between an Australian student and her Taiwanese friend. The analysis reveals information production and reception on three social scales: public health policies, institutionalized health instruction, and interpersonal-care practices. On each scale, masking is enregistered as a semiotic sign associated with particular social actions, actors, and relations. This enregisterment transpires through an orchestration of verbal and non-verbal resources, conveying ideologies about invisible viruses in everyday life. While inconsistencies exist across scales, masking is consistently overlaid with civic solidarity and moral responsibility. In times of crisis, mask-wearing is an issue of public health and a process of typifying behaviors, identities, and relationships. (COVID-19, enregisterment, scale)*

The current study investigates the discursive strategies used by Jewish Israeli women when telling stories of self-empowerment involving interpersonal tension with authority figures. Our corpus is based on in-depth interviews with thirty women aged fifty to ninety-three from the southern city of Beer Sheva, Israel. We identified forty-two narratives manifesting interpersonal tension, mostly with authority figures. Drawing on the theoretical framework of narrative analysis, we conduct a performance-based, pragmatic microanalysis of four stories through which we demonstrate an ensemble of strategies paramount in shaping and contesting power relations, including use of direct reported speech, address and reference terms, and code-switching. By telling their stories, our storytellers mobilized the storytelling event as an occasion to perform a self-empowering move through which they subverted the frameworks of authority not only on a local level in the narrated and storytelling events but potentially also on a broader societal level, disrupting hegemonic asymmetries. (Power relations, narratives, self-empowerment, direct reported speech, code-switching, terms of address, terms of reference)

This article is a case study on how Singaporean intellectuals articulate resistant language ideologies by enregistering the local vernacular, Singlish. The case in point is Gwee Li Sui's 2018 companion Spiaking Singlish, lauded as the first book to be written in Singlish about Singlish. It is argued that in tactically leveraging Singlish in a folk-lexicographical project, Gwee takes the vernacular to the third indexical order; and in so doing, he performs a ludic and extreme form of Singlish through which an everyday tongue turns into a fetish object. Contextualising Gwee's polemics within his tension with the language establishment in Singapore, the article highlights the ethical dilemma implicit in the celebration of languages speaking to an egalitarian ethos, suggesting that in enunciating a vernacular on the order of reflexive performance, intellectuals may inadvertently fashion it into a more elitist language than that which is spoken on the streets. (Singlish, Singapore, enregisterment, performativity, indexicality)

In this article, we provide the first quantitative account of the frequent use of embedding in Shawi, a Kawapanan language spoken in Peruvian Northwestern Amazonia. We collected a corpus of ninety-two Frog Stories (Mayer 1969) from three different field sites in 2015 and 2016. Using the glossed corpus as our data, we conducted a generalised mixed model analysis, where we predicted the use of embedding with several macrosocial variables, such as gender, age, and education level. We show that bilingualism (Amazonian Spanish-Shawi) and education, mostly restricted by complex gender differences in Shawi communities, play a significant role in the establishment of linguistic preferences in narration. Moreover, we argue that the use of embedding reflects the impact of the mestizo1 society from the nineteenth century until today in Santa Maria de Cahuapanas, reshaping not only Shawi demographics but also linguistic practices. (Post-colonial societies, Amazonian linguistics, Kawapanan, Shawi, embedding, language variation and change, contact linguistics)*

This ethnographic study examines deaf or hard-of-hearing children's socialization in an oral classroom, a setting designed to promote spoken language as the primary mode of communication. Drawing from nine months of observations, I describe how the meanings assigned to children's vocalizations create a system of values and judgements that organizes and regulates classroom behavior. Specifically, vocalization itself is oriented to as a moral practice that is necessary for the mutual understanding and accomplishment of classroom activities. Informed by ethnomethodological and language-socialization perspectives, I illustrate how participants co-construct a local moral order wherein students are held accountable for ‘using their words’ to perform social actions. Analyses discuss three interactional contexts where moral issues are routinely constructed as contingent on and resolvable through vocalization—children's help-seeking, children's disputes, and negotiations of classroom participation—thereby shaping children's understanding of language use and reflecting broader institutional expectations and ideology regarding oral communication. (Moral order, preschool children, socialization)*

Marketing research shows that organizations tailor communication for particular customer ‘segments’, but little is known about the live design of interaction for different categories. To investigate this, we examine telephone calls to a holiday sales call-centre (for ‘seniors’) and a university admissions call-centre (for ‘young’ students). While topically different, call-takers in both datasets requested callers’ email addresses in order to progress service. Using conversation analysis, we examine how these requests were designed, where and how ‘age’ was made relevant, and how subsequent service provision was handled in a way that matched callers’ presumed age categories. Contrastive to the static notion of ‘segments’, we show how recipient design is bound up with categorial considerations while being responsive to the live unfolding of actual interaction. The article demonstrates how a comparative collection-based approach can be used to analyse the relevance of social categories in situations where this is implicit or ambiguous. (Membership categorization, customer segmentation, conversation analysis, recipient design, requests, age)*

This study explores the social meanings of unfilled pauses, you know, like, and combinations thereof by comparing the evaluation of speech with these features to speech without them. The comparison is based on a set of perception surveys in which participants listened to manipulated audio stimuli and rated them on a series of scales. Unfilled pauses are evaluated differently from all other features: they are rated high on Status and low on Dynamism. Where significant differences emerge, the pragmatic markers you know, like, and combinations of pauses with these are always rated lower than the guises without. They are most sensitive to personal characteristics in the Dynamism dimension, followed by Conversational Skills, Likeability, and Status. The mechanism that adapts the potential social meanings of linguistic features when they are combined hinges on the social salience of the features in question. Various outcomes are possible ranging from additive to non-additive effects. (Like, you know, attitudes, social meanings, prestige, solidarity, dynamism)

This article presents a typology of phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical features illustrative of factors conditioning the usage of speakers and writers of Revived Manx, including substratal influence from English; language ideologies prevalent within the revival movement, especially forms of linguistic purism; and language-specific features of Manx and its orthography. Evidence is taken primarily from a corpus of Revived Manx speech and writing. The observed features of Revived Manx are situated within Zuckermann's (2009, 2020) framework of ‘hybridization’ and ‘revival linguistics’, which takes Israeli Hebrew as the prototypical model of revernacularization of a non-L1 language. However, Manx arguably provides a more typical example of what to expect when a revived minority language remains predominantly an L2 for an indefinite period, with each new cohort of speakers able to reshape the target variety in the absence of a firmly established L1 norm. (Manx, Celtic, language revival, language ideology, language shift, language contact)*

Recent work in linguistics, philosophy, and psychology suggests that the distinction between generic and specific (singular) reference is foundational to concept formation, and hence of special interest to social scientists. Generics provide the first-language learner with external evidence of the integrity of a word/concept cluster, partially filling in the scaffolding of concepts. As such, they are replicators, critical to the transmission of concepts across populations and across time. Generics are tacitly normative. As they refer to the constitutive properties of a concept rather than to its object, they tell us what—in a given social setting—a proper instance of the concept should look like. Generics sustain and reproduce social stereotypes, including—and perhaps especially—ethnoracial, class, and gender stereotypes. (Generics, conceptual formation, ethnography, tokenization, materiality)*

This study analyzes the social evaluations of the Andalusian Spanish ceceo merger and its split, distinción. A matched-guise experiment was created by digitally manipulating spontaneous speech from twelve Western Andalusian speakers, varying only in syllable-initial [s̪] and [θ] for <s> and <z,ci,ce>, creating ceceo and distinción guises. Based on 221 listeners from Huelva and Lepe, Spain, mixed effects linear regression models found that speakers with distinción guises were evaluated as being of higher social status, more urban, and more formal than speakers with ceceo guises. Additionally, listeners' comments referred not only to the sounds and graphemes, but also to the merger itself and its social connotations. The implications are two-fold: (i) consonant mergers may be subject to more overt social evaluation than vocalic mergers; and (ii) a merger can acquire social meaning, and this meaning in turn, may promote its split. (Mergers, splits, sociolinguistic perception, language attitudes, Andalusian Spanish, sociophonetics, dialect levelling, ceceo, distinción)*

Audiences often ascribe monolithic linguistic authority to news media institutions, viewing journalists as the bearers of language standards. Yet media are in fact heteroglossic, with journalists across different media platforms negotiating competing practical demands and different understandings of the social purposes and possibilities of their work. This article examines a case of hyperideologized minority-language media to show how the interplay of deep-seated language ideologies, the local sociohistorical context of media, and the material, technological affordances of different platforms produces a cline of enregisterment. It focuses on media produced in Buryat, a Mongolic language of southeastern Siberia whose speakers are shifting to Russian. Comparing journalists’ linguistic practices and audiences’ interpretations across the coexisting media platforms of newspapers, radio, and television shows how media enregisterment and, in turn, the enregisterment of a standard literary language occur along a cline that is shaped by the intersections of ideology with technology. (Media, language ideology, enregisterment, standardization, purism, materiality, Russia, Russian, Buryat)*

Harmonious multiracialism is one of Singapore's national values, yet race in Singapore is almost always precariously managed. In 2019, race once again became the centre of public debate when a government-sanctioned advertisement featured a Chinese Singaporean actor ‘brownfacing’ as an Indian Singaporean, incurring public outcry. Local entertainers Preeti and Subhas Nair responded with a rap music video that criticised the advertisement and included the line ‘Chinese people always out here fucking it up’, which drew flak from the government and the Chinese community in Singapore. This article considers the state's response to the antiracist practices of the Nair siblings, and the subsequent labelling of their behaviour as racist. The article also introduces the concept of the state listening subject and describes its role in the semiotic process of rearticulation to elucidate how the Singaporean state selectively (de)couples race and language to maintain the national racial order. (Raciolinguistic ideology, multiracialism, rearticulation, state listening subject, race, Singapore, antiracism)*

This variationist analysis investigates the development and spread of innit as an invariant tag in London English. The sociolinguistic distribution of innit in a socially stratified corpus of vernacular speech suggests that the form's emergence and spread were initiated and propelled system-internally through changes associated with grammaticalization. Frequency triggered phonetic reduction of isn't it to innit; loss of syntactic-semantic usage constraints and growing functional versatility enabled innit to seize the range of contexts and functions of grammatically-dependent tags (e.g. didn't you, weren't we), virtually ousting these from the system of negative-polarity interrogative tags. Examination of cross-linguistic data and comparisons with relevant pre- and non-contact varieties indicate multiple language contact and grammatical replication may have played an ancillary role. I flag some challenges of establishing contact effects in discourse-pragmatic change, and propose that the promotion of innit for invariant use was governed by its low salience and social indexicality of localness. (Innit, question tags, (Multicultural) London English, grammaticalization, language contact, grammatical replication)*

This article examines Iranian social media users’ understandings of normative behavior by focusing on a new online ‘nonstandard’ orthographic norm: the ‘hekasreh’. Adopting a chronotopic approach to the study of discourse, I analyze Iranian Twitter users’ social positionings towards the ‘hekasreh’ phenomenon. I show how tweeters invoke different spatiotemporal configurations, and the normative behaviors associated with them, to argue for and/or against this new orthographic norm. Focusing on the argumentative dynamics of the invoked chronotopes, I investigate the agentive and creative ways in which power is claimed and maintained in online spaces. This study, on the one hand, provides more empirical data to highlight the significance of attending to the online-offline nexus, and on the other hand argues for a more dynamic conceptualization of the interaction between normativity, power, and agency in online communication. (Social media, Farsi/Persian orthography, sociolinguistic normativity, chronotope, power, agency)*

On 7 January 2021, Jan Blommaert died aged 59, after a ten-month battle with cancer. He was an extraordinary person and a brilliant academic, and there have been a great many very moving personal accounts of how much Jan meant to the people he interacted with. I knew and worked with him for over twenty-five years, and during his protracted illness, for me and for a lot of others, it was good to be able to tell him directly how much I owed him. But beyond the warm, hospitable, humorous and hugely energising individual we knew, Jan was profoundly committed to—indeed lived—a programme of sociolinguistics that he often traced to the writings of Dell Hymes, the founder of Language in Society. A number of this programme's core elements were spelled out in the introduction to Hymes’ ground-breaking 1969 collection, Reinventing Anthropology, a ‘book… for people for whom “the way things are” is not reason enough for the ways things are, who find fundamental questions pertinent and in need of personal answer’ (1969:7). For my account of the value and vitality that Jan brought to sociolinguistics, I have borrowed from the title of Hymes’ introduction, ‘The use of anthropology: Critical, political, personal’ and, as well as citing some of Jan's own words, I also draw on the reflections of others as evidence of the vigour, clarity, and coherence with which he articulated a practice and purpose for work on language in society.

Membership categories such as ‘doctor’, ‘customer’, and ‘girl’ can form a set of alternative ways of referring to the same person. Moreover, speakers can select from this array of correct alternatives that term best fitted to what is getting done in their talk. In contrast, self-references alone ordinarily do not convey category membership, unless the speaker specifically employs some sort of category-conveying formulation. This report investigates how speakers manage the categorical relevance of these simplest self-references (e.g. ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’) as a practical means of self-presentation. We first describe how speakers forestall recipient attribution of membership categories. We then consider cases where simple self-references are subjected to subsequent elaboration—via self-categorization—in the face of possible recipient misreading of the speaker's category membership. Thereafter, we introduce the practice of contrastive entanglement, and describe how speakers employ it to fashion tacitly categorized self-references that serve the formation of action. (Person reference, conversation analysis, membership categorization devices, race, gender)*

Previous work on the Osaka dialect (OD) collectively suggests that this western regional variant of Japanese is associated with informality, masculinity, and affective fatherhood—social meanings that can be recruited in the construction of audio-visual media personas. This study examines the use of OD by one protagonist in the film Soshite chichi ni naru/Like father, like son, as well as the social meanings that listeners attribute to this variety of Japanese. Specifically, we ask two questions: (i) to what extent is the production of OD in the film recognizable to native speakers of Japanese, and (ii) what qualities do Japanese language users attribute to OD? A dialect recognition experiment found low recognizability of OD but high recognizability of a general ‘nonstandard Japanese’ language variety. Qualitative data revealed that Japanese language users perceived OD to index various characteristics including that of a masculine, affective father. (Perception, dialect, fatherhood, Osaka dialect, indexicality)*

Aggressive, sexist humor is often understood as expressions of inner, misogynist attitudes. This article, however, investigates rape humor as a collective and interactive phenomenon. Drawing on an infamous Swedish podcast episode, we illuminate rape humor in terms of affect, desire, and repression (Butler 1987; Billig 1999), and as such, how taboo-breaking arouses both pleasure and fear among the participants. The analyses detail affective practices that both promote and discipline affects. The men in the group interpellate one of the participants as a clown, someone whose taboo-breaking they interactionally support and simultaneously distance themselves from. The article concludes that affects, like subject positions, are interpellated in interaction. Building on Wetherell's (2013) understanding of affect as both discursive and embodied, we suggest a reintroduction of repression/desire into a discursively oriented framework. (Affective practices, rape humor, desire, repression, taboo, misogynist masculinity, podcast)*

We examine moments in social interaction in which a person formulates what another thinks or believes. Such formulations of belief constitute a practice with specifiable contexts and consequences. Belief formulations treat aspects of the other person's prior conduct as accountable on the basis that it provided a new angle on a topic, or otherwise made a surprising contribution within an ongoing course of actions. The practice of belief formulations subjectivizes the content that the other articulated and thereby topicalizes it, mobilizing commitment to that position, an account, or further elaboration. We describe how the practice can be put to work in different activity contexts: sometimes it is designed to undermine the other's position as a subjective ‘mere belief’, at other times it serves to mobilize further topic talk. Throughout, belief formulations show themselves to be a method by which we get to know ourselves and each other as mental agents. (Accountability, beliefs, courses of action, formulations, inference, subjectivity, topicalization)*

This article investigates sexual and gender ideologies in online dating profiles of Sebian gay men using corpus-linguistic and discourse-analytic methods. Selected keywords are analysed in context, and particular attention is paid to collocation patterns, including grammatical collocates that are shown to carry discursive relevance beyond style. The analysis reveals that repeated associations centre on concepts of masculinity and normality, in a local indexical order of ‘proper’ manhood, sexuality, global modernity, and national identity. Overall, the texts are most strongly characterized by adversarial distance towards certain gay men, operating in normalizing assimilation to the national (heterosexual) citizen ideal. A broader mechanism, termed recursive normalisation, is described as underpinning the observed patterns. The findings are further discussed as highlighting the pitfalls of theory and social movements focused on social assimilation, arguing for the need for further queer linguistic deconstruction of the normalising discourses that intersect marginalized communities and broader, systemic hegemonies. (Gay men, online dating, masculinity, recursive normalization)