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 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.

The Catherine Tate Show (2004–7) is a rich source of instances of stereotyped language varieties as linked to various TV tropes, reflecting how speakers coming from specific regional areas in the British Isles are generally and stereotypically perceived within British society, thus contributing to their linguistic enregisterment. Building on previous works on dialects in the media and their stereotypical representations, this study gives an account of the various implications and functions of the linguistic phenomena that are specific to the Southeast of England and that are exploited for the creation of some of the fictional identities presented in the show. Specific phonological features that implicitly collocate Tate’s recurring characters both regionally and socially are identified and their functions discussed.

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.

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.