This article provides a global survey of categorical gender indexicality that reveals the near exclusive presence of the phenomenon in the languages of the Native Americas, a fact for which a historical rationale is offered. The survey is helpful in contributing to our understanding of social indexicality in three ways. First, while two-place (or relational) social indexicals, like honorifics, have been well studied, one-place (or absolute) social indexicals have not. Systems of gender indexicality, overwhelmingly of the absolute type, thus help flesh out the typology of social indexicality. Second, the survey illustrates the remarkable complementarity of semantic gender, as a category of denotation, and social gender, as an aspect of identity indexed in discourse, in particular as these overlap in cases of gender deixis. Finally, the study of gender indexicality in the Native Americas reveals that not all gender indexicality is equally gender performative. A number of diagnostics of a categorical type—from ubiquitous rule-governed regularity of patterning to quotability—illustrate that in the cases discussed, forms are highly presupposing, not performative, of the social gender of the speech participants they index. (Gender, indexicality, deixis, Native Americas)*

The migration of old-urban elites to new-urban areas has been given scant attention in the sociolinguistics of mobility. This article examines language ideologies of differentiation that emerged from the migration of Morocco's bona fide old-urban elite from the city of Fez (the Fessis) to the new metropolis of Casablanca. This understudied sociolinguistic encounter brings into sharp focus two quintessential old-urban and new-urban varieties of Arabic along with their complex indexical system that links linguistic forms to identities, lifestyles, and moralities. Based on ethnography and discourse analysis of interviews with two women of Fessi extraction in Casablanca (a migrant and a local-born), I provide an in-depth account of what sounding Fessi means and accomplishes—and fails to accomplish—for these women, showing in the process the (re)production and change of language ideologies. The article demonstrates how changes in indexicalities relate to ongoing group boundary reconfiguration and to processes of linguistic (non)accommodation. (Arabic, North Africa, language ideologies, indexicality, gender, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics of mobility, historical prestige, social reallocation)*

This article demonstrates the ongoing, culturally situated and co-constructed nature of the translation of Chinese medicine from Chinese into English. Building upon scholarship in anthropology, sociolinguistics, and translation studies, this article contributes to the building of an anthropologically grounded theory of translation as an ongoing lived event, with implications far beyond the simple transfer of meaning from “source” to “target” languages. Through the examination of video and audio data collected over two years, I show how participants in classroom interactions at a southern California school of Chinese medicine not only interactively accomplish the work of translating specific Chinese terms, but also accomplish a great deal socially with such translation activity. Participants are thus shown to use translation as a platform for social positioning as well as a tool for socializing interlocutors into various notions of evidence and ideologies of language, both of which have implications for clinical decision-making in practice. (Translation, language ideologies, classroom interaction, Chinese medicine)*

This article analyzes the multimodal integration of gesture, talk, and sociocultural context. More specifically, I investigate how forms of Gemeinschaft/Gesellshaft community are embodied in the concrete details of multimodal form—in the iconic interplay of multimodal practice and symbolic forms of social organization. Using a focus group interview of community policing training, I show how criss-crossing laminations of participation emerge through novel gestural configurations like multimodal quotation and pragmatic beats to not only pace the rhythm of speech but simultaneously plot the spatial coordinates of social organization. In the course of events, we see how speakers integrate gesture, gaze, and postural orientation into the stream of their utterances to project rhythmically infused meanings of communal identity, social solidarity, and cultural opposition. (Multimodality, community, legal discourse)*