Recent scholarship on the working of racial formation processes underscores the intersection between discursive and structural components in the emergence of “race,” and the agency of individuals at the local and global level in articulating its meaning. This article offers a link toward understanding how racial formation processes operate in face-to-face interaction, by highlighting how people do racialization. Based on fieldwork in Italy, it explores how conversationalists deploy agreement to co-construct a racialized image of immigrants to Italy. It is argued that this deployment leads to reinforcement of the racist stances expressed in the conversation itself, and possibly beyond it. In addition, the repeated occurrence of agreement during the co-construction of utterances produces a spiral effect around racializing discourse, a progressive deepening of the racialization itself. At the same time, agreement leads to a decrease of personal responsibility for the statements made, which come to be co-constructed among conversationalists. (Agreement, racialization, immigration, Italy)

This article considers language use in Tanzanian beauty pageants, where contestants’ onstage speech is the focus of explicit and implicit critique. In particular, contestants who speak English are far more likely to win than are their Swahili-speaking counterparts. But because English has limited circulation and is restricted to the educated elite, speaking English is, for most contestants, possible only through memorization. Local ideologies that give preference to purity over standardness mean that, while contestants’ speeches are often full of grammatical oddities, their linguistic posturing is typically well received. Yet once a contestant reaches the pinnacle of competition, expectations for language use rise, and once-successful contestants find themselves at a glass ceiling. Findings presented here point to the local and hierarchical nature of language ideologies, and to the need to account for the common practice in multilingual communities of successfully employing “incomplete” linguistic knowledge for indexical and referential effect. (Language ideology, multilingualism, Swahili, English, language purity, beauty pageants, education)*

This article examines the linguistic ideological work entailed in the analyses of Irish by the “revolutionary scholar” and cofounder of the Gaelic League, Eoin MacNeill. It does so to discern one central way in which the essentialized link between the Irish language and a unified Irish people became an efficacious political construction during the armed struggle for independence in the early 20th century. It shows how MacNeill used authoritative linguistic science to engender nationalist sentiment around Irish through semiotic processes even as he challenged a dominant conception of language prevalent in European nationalist movements and social thought. The essay argues that MacNeill wrote against the unilateral valorization of codified linguistic homogeneity and embraced the heterogeneous variation of spoken discourse even as he sought to consolidate Irish national identity through sameness claims. This critical examination suggests that scholars of nationalism reconsider the taken-for-granted homogenizing efforts of nationalist endeavors that are ubiquitously presumed to negatively sanction linguistic variation. (Nationalism, linguistic ideology, Ireland, semiotics, heterogeneity, Eoin MacNeill, Gaelic League, Europe, scientific knowledge)