This article moves from the familiar—the human—to the very different in sociolinguistics—the dairy cow. Based on multispecies ethnography, the aim of this article is to advocate the animal turn in sociolinguistics (Cornips 2019). The guiding question is how do non-human animals, that is, dairy cows—mutually and with humans—imbue their intraspecies and interspecies interaction with meaning that makes sense for the two species. The concept of semiotic repertoire is invoked in order to investigate how dairy cows draw on resources to make meaning, and the concept of material-semiotic assemblage is applied in order to account for the different effects generated by the resources that come together at particular moments. The assemblage perspective does not take a ‘cow’ or ‘human’ as discrete and fixed but focuses on the distributed and emergent agency as a relational effect of all elements involved: humans, non-humans, and other. (Intraspecies and interspecies interactions, the semiotic repertoire, assemblage, dairy cows, practices)*

Showcasing how understandings of social mobility encoded raciolinguistic ideologies of the ideal upwardly mobile speaker, I investigate blue- and white-collar orientation to language, race, and social mobility in the Canadian labor market. I analyze these two subject positionalities and the way bundles of skills are ‘bundled otherwise’ when ideologies of race and language are invoked as relevant to a class experience. While the acquisition of standard languages remains understood as a gateway to upward mobility, the increased commodification of language made the acquisition of standard registers of French and English a skill amongst others, on par with any other. If this shift challenges an implicit ‘linguistic’ bias embedded in emic and scientific understandings of class, raciolinguistic ideologies continue to organize worker's orientations to language and work, be it to imagine themselves as cosmopolitan workers or to defend the positions of ethnic, national, and racialized groups in the economy. (Social class, raciolinguistics, work, language ideologies, francophone Canada, bilingualism)*

This article advocates for a ‘sociolinguistics of deglobalization’ that focuses on the sociolinguistic impacts of major shifts in the world system that have taken place since 2008 and have become particularly salient amidst the covid pandemic. Drawing on case studies of China, Indonesia, Ethiopia, and Nigeria, we describe the period after 2008 as an emerging post-neoliberal epoch characterized by the intensifying of state power, constrained resistance, differential inclusion, and organized abandonment. Our article explores the theoretical, methodological, and ethical challenges of researching the sociolinguistic impacts of these developments. We also argue that our discipline's dominant approach to global-scale analysis—the sociolinguistics of globalization—has impeded our ability to perceive the emerging dynamics of deglobalization. Our call for a sociolinguistics of deglobalization is offered as both a provocation and invitation to our discipline to engage with the rapidly changing nature of world politics. (Deglobalization, sovereignty, neoliberalism, coloniality, securitization)*

The article describes the practices through which patients’ self-presentations are challenged in psychotherapy. Based on the analysis of thirty-eight instances from psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, analyzed with methods of conversation analysis, narrative analysis, and coding, this article reports on how therapists challenge patients’ self-conceptualizations in response to patients’ self-presentations. Challenges mostly follow patients’ descriptive, narrative, or evaluative accounts that include a strong claim about their self. Challenges to the self pertain to core issues of the therapeutic projects. They are mostly built in ways that show its sensitivity to probable rejection by the patient. Overwhelmingly, the challenge is accounted for by reference to shared knowledge built in the participants’ shared interactional history. Arguably, psychotherapy is a particular setting where the organization of face-work is modified, as occasional challenging of the co-interactant's self-presentation is part of the institutional task of the professional participant. Data are in Finnish and German. (Self, psychotherapy, Goffman, conversation analysis)*

This article investigates visual communication practices among members of a disabled people's organisation (DPO) in a market in Uganda. Deaf members and many of the hearing members are proficient in Ugandan Sign Language (UgSL) and use it daily. I examine three communicative settings within the market, identifying varied modes of visual communication in use, ranging from loosely conventionalised multimodal improvisation to standard UgSL. Deaf stallholders value the varied forms of linguistic community accessed through these different modes, which are complementary rather than opposing, except at key moments of tension. By combining ‘deaf space’ theory with Silverstein's distinction between speech and language communities, I link the visual communication practices of deaf and hearing marketgoers to the varying forms of solidarity that underly linguistic communities. Deaf marketgoers creatively articulate different visual communication potentialities and the communities they arise from and index, including negotiating linguistic access through strategically opposing deaf and hearing communities. (Deaf space, sign language, language communities)*

This article explores one underestimated aspect of language in migration settings, namely the experience of not being in full control of circumstances and doing. Recent research has indeed highlighted aspects such as transcendence of boundaries, hinting at a version of multilingualism among migrants that does not feature enough of their experience of constraints. In contrast, other scholars have emphasised structural inequalities often focusing on macro-social pressures that migrants have to navigate. Approaching lived experiences as they emerge while researcher and informant build rapport-in-talk, the study concentrates on a young Gambian in Italy. He speaks of a lack of institutional support and being in a position where certain languages cannot be used, despite concrete help from a local NGO and personal efforts. The data also show suffering beyond language-related constraints and the progressive mutual surfacing of linguistic repertoires in interaction, evidencing more broadly the merits of this type of qualitative study. (Migration, constraints, Gambia, Italy)*

In this article, we address the following question: how do comprehenders reason about the persona embodied by the speaker to determine the referential meaning of numerical expressions such as ‘The price is $200’? Using a picture selection task, we show that descriptions uttered by speakers embodying a Nerdy persona, indexically associated with highly precise speech, are interpreted more precisely than those uttered by speakers embodying a Chill persona, indexically associated with imprecise speech. These findings contribute to building a more integrative perspective between the socio-indexical and the referential domain of signification, highlighting comprehenders’ social perception of the speaker as a crucial element informing pragmatic reasoning, and meaning interpretation more broadly. (Social meaning, personae, pragmatic reasoning, precision, numerals)*

Scholars have shown how speakers are inclined to discursively position themselves as ‘ordinary’ in order to claim and benefit from membership in a socially unmarked category, and that the effect of ‘being ordinary’ is an effortful communicative achievement (e.g. Sacks 1984). This study re-examines and extends such insight by focusing on socially marked individuals—people with disabilities—and considers the effect of inhabiting a nonnormative body has on the semiotic production of self as ordinary. The multimodal self-presentation of Nikki Lilly, a popular disabled YouTuber, showcases the tension between inhabiting a physically anomalous body and projecting ‘an average teenager’ persona. The analysis of the vlogger's YouTube and Instagram posts shows that resignifying the nonnormative body and self as symbolically unmarked hinges on recruiting hypernormative gendered resources. I argue that by exaggerating normality, Nikki Lilly's recognized ‘ordinary’ self-presentation enunciates normalcy as an illusory imperative and materializes as subversive the performance of disability. (Nikki Lilly, embodiment, multimodality, presentational media, disability, ordinariness, normativity)*

Despite the significance of intersex constituencies for explaining the social nature of sex and gender, intersex linguistic and social practices remain a yet unexplored frontier within sociolinguistics. This article examines fundamental frequency (F0) and vowel formant (F1–F3) production by participants with Turner Syndrome (TS), one of the most common intersex chromosomal conditions, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This analysis demonstrates significant differences in fundamental frequency and F3 among different participant groups. I argue that height, growth hormone, and chromosomes are fundamental in constructing womanhood for TS women. Along with relevant ethnographic data, these results call for a re-examination of the body within linguistic and anthropological understandings of ‘womanhood’ and ‘femaleness’. This article highlights the ways these biological factors intersect with gendered perceptions of age and maturity, which can have real-world effects on linguistic practice and the social life of intersex individuals. (Brazilian Portuguese, fundamental frequency, gender, intersex, Turner Syndrome, vowel formants, critical intersex studies)*

Long an immigrant society, whether Hong Kong welcomes ethnic minorities remains debatable. Combining Wesselmann and colleagues’ (2016) social exclusion framework, raciolinguistics, and interview data, this study investigates the social exclusion experience of Hong Kong's African economic and student migrants. The findings show that African immigrants who lack linguistic capacity are ostracised in different areas of life. Impolite language usage stigmatises them as poor and ghost-like and stereotypes them as refugees. Taking a raciolinguistic perspective, however, this study finds that race, rather than language, is the root cause of social exclusion. Lastly, the study shows that African migrants manifest agency in ameliorating marginalisation through various activities, revealing the bidirectional nature of social exclusion. Overall, this study empirically enriches the current understanding of Africans’ social exclusion experiences in Hong Kong through the lens of language. It theoretically contributes to the current discussion on raciolinguistics by extending it to the Asian context. (Social exclusion, Hong Kong, African immigrants, verbal rejection, non-verbal rejection, racism, raciolinguistics)*

This article asks why the Occitan language revitalization movement, which began in the 1850s, failed to convince the vast majority of Occitan speakers. Traditional explanations focus on social conflict, alienation, and diglossic ideologies. While essential elements, they may not provide a full account. Challenging the idea that patois is just a derogatory term pinned on what is in fact a language, this article proposes to take seriously the claim by traditional speakers that a patois is not a language. Drawing on fieldwork in Provence and historical data, I propose that the divergence is fundamentally ontological, revealing sharp differences that suggest that patois and language are indeed two separate things. The language movement's reduction of the patois/language issue to one of labels helps explain why traditional speakers and language advocates have been talking past each other for 150 years, raising practical questions for language movements worldwide. (Patois, occitan, ontologies of language, language revitalization, linguistic natures)*

This article is a rejoinder to Lee (2023) who makes certain claims about the enregisterment of Singlish via a case study of Spiaking Singlish. In challenging Lee's key claim that Spiaking Singlish deploys a form of elitist language, I argue that the Singlish features in the book need not demand a solely ludic reading and actually draw from everyday practices. Accordingly, enregisterment ought to be understood as a diachronic and evolving process in the vein of Butler's (1999) notion of sedimentation. Moreover, Lee's characterization of the ‘monolectal Singlish user’ is classist and reductionist, unsupported by recent research and census data. Consequently, Spiaking Singlish need not be seen as an elitist work, but as contributing to ever-changing attitudes towards Singlish in the public sphere. This article is an alternative iteration to Lee's (2023) that has implications for the way we understand enregisterment in Singapore and choose to represent it as a process. (Enregisterment, Singlish, Singapore, sociolinguistics, language ideological debates)*

This article explores the characterological metadiscourses through which characters, or figures of personhood, become modeled, evaluated, and enacted during a multi-ethnic, community-inclusive theater project that aims to make the group's ‘joint voice’ heard on stage and in society. Based on ethnographic data and discourse-analytical methods, the article examines two modes of characterological metadiscourse that contribute to the construction of an ‘alternative’ discursive space that allows the group to reflect on and to experiment with everyday social interactions. First, the article analyzes writing and conversation tasks that deal with experiences of ethnicization and inequality. Second, the article analyzes exercises in acting techniques, in which the focus turns to universal characterological dimensions, enabling each participant to participate in the joint voice as an equal performer. The analyses illuminate a local strategy of managing multi-ethnic relations and committing to ideals of solidarity and egalitarianism with the purpose of collective social action. (Voice, entextualization, interdiscursivity, ethnicity, raciolinguistics, theater)*

Drawing on data generated from a two-year ethnographic observation with a group of multiethnic Black women, this investigation delves into the ways they employ discursive and linguistic strategies, namely solidarity through difference and distinction, solidarity through denaturalizing difference, and solidarity through shared struggles and learning in deictically anchored interactions. The study presents a moment-by-moment analysis of culturally and socially situated conversations. These conversations allow us to see how the social actors enact different stance-taking and scaling practices to construct meanings about race that intersect with gender/transnational identities. Discursive practices show that when we closely attend to race, transnationalism, and gender, specifically considering the particularity of Black womanhood, new and more complex ways of understanding transnational identity formation emerge. Participants’ constructions indicate that women co-construct a unique brand of Black feminist solidarity that is not based on similarity but meaningfully created through differentiation and distinction. (Black immigrant women, solidarity, stance-taking, scaling and deixis difference, African diaspora, intersectionality)*

Linguistic differences in staged or scripted performances matter, since language, or language-ing, is a critical component in structuring power and maintaining unequal social differences or challenging and complicating them. To investigate such scripted speech in the context of Indigenous characters, we draw on the semiotic processes of erasure and rhematisation as well as the newly proposed concepts of erasure marking and semiotic overlay. We examine a dataset of Australian television series with Indigenous characters that feature significant creative involvement by Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander individuals. Crucially, these series address mainstream, mixed audiences, meaning they must blend multiple perspectives to reach diverse viewers. We explore overt meta-discourses and subtle signs of linguistic characterisation to show how Indigenous screen creatives counter or challenge erasure and rhematisation by diversifying and complicating characters’ linguistic repertoires and bringing in Indigenous discourses and perspectives. (Semiotic processes, ethnoracialisation, decolonisation, Australia, mainstream media, Aboriginal English, language ideologies)*

In this article, we examine the production and assessment of evidence about spirit beliefs in the international criminal trial of Ugandan rebel commander Dominic Ongwen, submitted by the defense to show that their client committed the crimes he is accused of under duress. This duress defense was ultimately rejected by the ICC Judges, based on a binary understanding of ‘believing’ that depicts Ongwen and other LRA commanders as impostors. However, our analysis of how this evidence about Acholi spirituality is entextualized in testimony-taking and recontextualized in the Judgment reveals that this belief-binary is not exclusively the outcome of the Judges’ recontextualization efforts. In fact, the foundations are already established at entextualization stage, in the questioning by the defense. These continuities, we argue, offer a fresh perspective on the notion of text trajectory, redirecting attention to the underlying ‘grammar’ of the legal language game. (International Criminal Court, text trajectory, entextualization, recontextualization, evidence, spirit belief, Dominic Ongwen, Uganda)*

In this article, I argue that centering multimodal practices is important in the study of human communication and sociality, and becomes particularly relevant in the presence of asymmetries in language access. Using data collected as part of a two-year linguistic ethnography of deaf youth in Iquitos, Peru, I demonstrate how three siblings engage in extended dispute routines even in the face of sensory and communicative asymmetries. The microanalysis of video-recorded sibling interaction sheds light on their use of diverse multimodal resources to navigate the common interactional work of securing an interlocutor, coordinating attention, managing misunderstandings, and establishing shared references (Sidnell 2007, 2009). Not only do the siblings utilize multimodal resources to carry out the interactional project of making an accusation and building alliances, but they also ‘co-operatively’ engage in building a shared semiotic repertoire (C. Goodwin 2018). (Deaf, sign language, linguistic ethnography, multimodality, semiotic repertoire, Peru)*