This study is a sociophonetic investigation of dialect variation and change in the East African Asian community in Leicester, UK. The community differs from other strands of the British Asian diaspora because of its migration history: a two-stage journey (‘twice migration’) within a few generations, first from the Indian subcontinent to East Africa (late nineteenth century) and from there onward to Britain (early 1970s). We examine variation in the production of the foot, strut, and nurse vowels across two generations of East African Asian migrants with a focus on the usage of originally Indian English features, identity expression, changing sense of belonging, and desire to maintain the original culture from the East African homelands. Our sociolinguistic examination of the speakers’ migration history demonstrates that, despite a strong affiliation with East Africa, first-generation speakers have predominantly maintained Indian English patterns whereas second-generation subjects partake in accommodation to an (educated) variety of East Midlands English. (Twice migration, accommodation, identity, variation and change in the diaspora, foot, strut, and nurse vowels, Indian English, East African English, East Midlands English)*

In this article, I explore the notions of indexicality and stancetaking practice through the analysis of a single lexical item embedded in the speech act of complimenting among young Japanese speakers. After revisiting prominent frameworks of indexicality and stance, I illustrate the ways in which the lexical item sugoi ‘amazing’ performs multiple pragmatic functions: as a marker of praise, surprise, or mock impoliteness; an intensifier; or silence-filler in the act of complimenting. On the basis of extensive sociolinguistic interviews and ethnographic metadata, I discuss how and why Japanese speakers use the variants sugoi and sugee to build intricately on their indexical field in the context of complimenting. I argue that sugoi and sugee, canonically assumed to index speaker gender, are used as a linguistic resource to perform larger interactional functions and stancetaking practice among young Japanese speakers. (Compliments, indexicality, stance, interactional analysis, Japanese, pragmatic function)*

This study examines how friends in their mid-twenties appropriate texts from videogames they have played to serve particular functions in their everyday face-to-face conversations. Speakers use references to the videogames Papers, Please and The Oregon Trail to shift the epistemic territories of conversations when they encounter interactional dilemmas. These epistemic shifts simultaneously rekey formerly problematic talk (on topics like rent, money, and injuries) to lighter, humorous talk, reframing these issues as being part of a lived videogame experience. Overlapping game frames are laminated upon real-life frames, and are strengthened by embedded frames containing constructed dialogue. This study contributes to understanding how epistemic shifts relying on intertextual ties can shift frames during interactional dilemmas in everyday conversation, which is ultimately conducive to group identity construction. (Intertextuality, framing, epistemics, identity, interactional sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, humor, videogames)*

This article is an examination of the interaction between evangelists and participants of a demonic deliverance (exorcism) ceremony in a London, UK Pentecostal church. The data is taken from an online recording and transcribed using conversation analysis conventions. A familiar feature of exorcism practice is the initial demand for the demon's identity. This study suggests that the importance of asking this question is due to it being procedurally strategic in modelling a performative path of the deliverance ceremony, which results in ritual efficacy. In particular, it is proposed that the omission of the question asking for the identity of the demon causes the deliverance path to become temporarily disrupted. This disruption is the result of a loss of thematic mapping between adverse life events and the causal agency within this specific sphere of sociocultural activity. (Religion, exorcism, possession, diaspora, spirits)*

The Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat) is the central feature of the Google-powered Endangered Languages Project (endangeredlanguages.com), which is a venue for sharing information and resources on the world's endangered languages and the knowledge contained in them. One key feature of ELCat is a quantitative measure that can be used to understand the level of endangerment of any language. Quantitative measurements are needed to compare language vitality across a variety of contexts around the globe, and can be used as a parallel to measurements of other forms of threats to biocultural diversity. This article addresses the development of the Language Endangerment Index (LEI). Based on four factors (intergenerational transmission, absolute number of speakers, speaker number trends, and domains of use), this index is different from other methods of assessment in several ways, especially as it can be used even if limited information is available. (Language endangerment, vitality, intergenerational transmission, speaker numbers, domains of language use)*

The Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat) is one of several similar responses to a perceived need for better data on language vitality. My remarks here are framed as a direct reply to Lee & Van Way's article, but really address larger issues in the ongoing debate about a perceived need to classify, inventory, and enumerate endangered languages. Lee & Van Way focus on one aspect of ELCat, the Language Endangerment Index (LEI), discussing a number of shortcomings in other current models. As an instrument for determining the level of language endangerment, the LEI is presented as a preferable alternative to other metrics, including Fishman's (1991) Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS), or EGIDS, the Expanded scale, based on the work of Lewis & Simons (2010), or UNESCO's (2003) expert scale. Lee & Van Way's discussion presupposes that such metrics are needed, and that it is beneficial to have a method for measuring vitality. Specifically, they argue that ‘for those concerned with preserving the world's fragile linguistic diversity, it is desirable to be able to quantify language vitality’. This is the underlying assumption of not only ELCat and LEI, but of other language catalogues, such as the Ethnologue (Lewis, Simons, & Fennig 2015), UNESCO's Atlas (Moseley 2010), and other vitality metrics, as discussed in Lee & Van Way.