In this paper I attempt to show what a micro approach involving fine-grained sociolinguistic analyses has to contribute to the understanding of the causes of discrimination on grounds of race in South Africa. I present analyses of intra- and intercultural encounters involving native speakers of English and Zulu which suggest that differences in sociocultural background and discourse conventions contribute to misinterpretation of intent and misjudgement of attitude and ability. Repeated stressful encounters of this kind, I suggest, generate negative cultural stereotypes. Finally, I sketch how the larger, structural, historically given forces, which are the concern of macro studies, combine with the results of intercultural encounters to achieve a negative cycle of socially created discrimination. (Interactional sociolinguistics, culture-specific discourse conventions. intercultural communication failure and prejudice, South African English)

This article investigates differences in telephone behaviour in England and Greece in the light of Brown and Levinson's model of interaction. It focusses upon differences both in verbal telephone call behaviour and in the attitudes and values attached to telephone usage. Explanations are placed within a broad framework of cultural differences in the preferred interactional strategies of the two societies. (Sociolinguistics, culturally determined variations in telephone behaviour, politeness phenomena, Greece versus England)

Sociolinguistic studies over the past ten years have demonstrated time and again how linguistic behavior changes as a person's social position changes, and how language is thus an excellent indicator of social status and social change.

This paper sketches Spanish colonial policies toward Southern Peruvian Quechua in order to identify long-term trends and constants. I emphasize the following conjunctures in the debate on the status of the indigenous languages: (1) the simultaneous efforts to restrict the inroads of bilingualism in the legal and political domain and to encourage bilingualism among local headmen so as to facilitate indirect rule in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; (2) the debate as to the role of the vernacular in religious education and missionary work in the same period, a debate in which the position favoring use of the vernacular held out for a time against calls for forced liquidation of the indigenous languages; (3) the ascendancy of the position calling for liquidation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; and (4) the role of Southern Peruvian Quechua as a nationalist emblem during the eighteenth century.

These conjunctures have considerable relevance today. Differences in vocabulary and ideological justification have obscured the continuity between colonial and modern language policy. The issues debated, the limits of the alternatives proposed as solutions, and even the practical efforts carried out on behalf of alternative policies, have been surprisingly perdurable. For four and a half centuries the “Andean language debate,” the issues and terms of language policy, have continued to have at their center the question of whether or not the Quechua have a right to exist as a separate community. (Language policy, colonialism, South America, Quechua)

This article examines the consequences of neoliberalism in two separate domains of multilingual language use in the context of Nepal: language education and tourism. We show that institutions and individuals have appropriated and reproduced this ideology with their creative tactics, agency, and practices that both help them promote and commodify their ethnolinguistic identity and language skills while also allowing them to acquire multilingual repertoires in global languages such as English, German, Chinese, Japanese, and the indigenous local language Newari. We show that English as a global language does not always accord more cultural capital and economic value, nor is the teaching and learning of local indigenous languages always confined to the ideologies of identity politics and language preservation. We argue that while the ideologies of English as a global language and of indigenous languages as tools for ethnolinguistic identity do not disappear from the scene, new forces of globalization and neoliberalism bestow new meanings to multilingual repertoires and practices. (Neoliberalism, multilingualism, commodification, ethnolinguistic identity, Nepal)*

When offered unfamiliar words, do children attend to them? Examination of 701 offers of new words drawn from the longitudinal records of five children provides extensive evidence of attention to the new words: Children repeated the new word in the next turn 54% of the time; they acknowledged it in the next turn with markers like yeah or uh-huh 9% of the time, or made a relevant move-on by alluding to some aspect of its referent, again in the next turn, 38% of the time. By comparison, the repeat-rate in new-to-given shifts in conversation is significantly lower. The present data provide strong evidence for some immediate uptake. When children register that new words are new, they can assign them some preliminary meaning and begin to use them right away from as young as age two.This research was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (SBR97-31781), the Spencer Foundation (199900133), and the Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. I am indebted to Andrew D-W. Wong for help with the data analysis, to Karin Kastens for locating elusive articles, and to Bruno Estigarribia, Barbara F. Kelly, David A. McKercher, and Edy Veneziano for discussion and comment.

This paper discusses a number of speech acts and speech genres from English, Polish, and Japanese, approaching them through the words which name them. It is claimed that folk names of speech acts and speech genres are culture-specific and provide an important source of insight into communicative routines most characteristic of a given society; and that to fully exploit this source one must carry Out a rigorous semantic analysis of such names and express the results of this analysis in a culture-independent semantic metalanguage. The author proposes such a metalanguage and illustrates her approach with numerous detailed semantic analyses. She suggests that analyses of speech acts and speech genres carried out in terms of English folk labels are ethnocentric and unsuitable for crosscultural comparison. She tries to show how folk labels of speech acts and speech genres characteristic of a given language reflect salient features of the culture associated with that language, and how the use of the proposed semantic metalanguage, derived from natural language, helps to achieve the desired double goal of insight and rigor in this area of study. (Speech acts, speech genres, semantics, lexicography, language and culture)

This article presents a case study of second dialect acquisition by three children over six years as they shift from Canadian to British English. Informed by Chambers's principles of second dialect acquisition, the analysis focuses on a frequent and socially embedded linguistic feature, T-voicing (e.g., pudding versus putting). An extensive corpus and quantitative methods permit tracking the shift to British English as it is happening. Although all of the children eventually sound local, the acquisition process is complex. Frequency of British variants rises incrementally, lagging behind the acquisition of variable constraints, which are in turn ordered by type. Internal patterns are acquired early, while social correlates lag behind. Acceleration of second dialect variants occurs at well-defined sociocultural milestones, particularly entering the school system. Successful second dialect acquisition is a direct consequence of sustained access to and integration with the local speech community.We would like to thank Tara, Shaman, and Freya for their patience and humor in letting us analyze these materials, and especially for the hilarity of their antics, which added greatly to the amount of fun we had in figuring out their second dialect acquisition. This study was inspired by and has also profited from many discussions with our mentor and friend Jack Chambers. We have also benefited from the insightful guidance of Peter Trudgill, both in print and in personal commentary. An anonymous reviewer added an additional perspective. Of course, none of them is responsible for any remaining shortcomings of our analysis or interpretation.

This article investigates variation in the use of glottalling and glottalization of the voiceless stops (p t k) in an urban variety of British English. Middlesbrough, the locality in question, lies on a regional border in the North of England and has been subject to repeated redrawing of local administrative boundaries and shifting orientations in terms of popular culture. Linguistic trends that converge with North Eastern varieties and diverge from those associated with Yorkshire are correlated with attitudinal information and informants' shifting sense of the identity of the area. Findings reveal socially conditioned variation in perceptions of language and community identity that have clear connections with both the changing sociogeographic status of the urban center and with the linguistic trends uncovered. Results emerging from the attitudinal data offer insight into both the indexical function of the linguistic forms of interest and the motivation for the change in progress in the voiceless stops.

Traditional perceptions that view leadership as a top-down process are increasingly challenged by so-called critical perspectives that acknowledge that leadership may involve several people. This article explores a particular type of these other leadership constellations, namely co-leadership where members share several leadership responsibilities.

Drawing on more than twenty hours of authentic discourse data recorded in two workplaces in Hong Kong, we employ the analytical concepts of face and identity to identify and describe some of the complex processes through which co-leadership is enacted. Our particular focus is situations in which members of the co-leadership team disagree with each other.

Our findings indicate that co-leadership is a dynamic process in which both members position themselves and each other as leader and co-leader at different moments throughout an interaction. This dynamic nature can be captured particularly well by exploring how face-work and identity construction are accomplished in interlocutors' everyday workplace talk. (Co-leadership, identity, face, workplace discourse, Hong Kong)*

The paper addresses itself to the study of the sociological correlates of speech behaviour among bilingual speakers of English and Swahili in Tanzania. Factors influencing language maintenance, code-switching and code-mixing are discussed. Four main phases of language acquisition are considered: the pre-primary school phase, the primary school phase, the secondary-school phase, and the post-secondary school phase.

Three languages with both varying and overlapping roles interact, creating a triglossia situation: first the vernacular or mother-tongue of each particular ethno-cultural group; secondly Swahili, the local lingua franca and national language; thirdly English, the predominant language of higher learning and to a certain extent of official and commercial business.

The paper also discusses the diglossia relationship between the vernacular and Swahili on the one hand and Swahili and English on the other. The developmental state of the languages is dealt with in terms of socially ‘restricted’ and ‘elaborated’ codes.

Urban life tends to impose its own socio-cultural influences on the bilinguals. There is free shifting and mixing between Swahili and English interlocutors, topics and setting.

Lastly the paper raises questions of the sociological and linguistic consequences of the multilingual situation. (Multilingualism, diglossia; code-switching; code-mixing; Swahili; English, national language problems.)

This article deals with the organization of multilingual meetings, considering the interplay of multimodal resources constituting their interactional order. Using Conversation Analysis, it explores the mobilization of multimodal and multilingual resources by the participants in order to make possible, sustain, and change participation within a meeting. Moreover, it focuses on language choice as a situated and embodied achievement.

The article's empirical contribution is a detailed analysis of a single case, an episode within a meeting in which several radical changes occur concerning language, participation, interactional space, and the categorization of the participants. The analysis explores the systematic organizational features characterizing the meeting before and after change, showing the embodied practices enabling a participant who was silent, sitting in the last row of the room, not speaking the language of the meeting, to become a recognized expert, thus changing the language of the meeting and reorganizing the opportunities to participate. (Conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, meetings, multilingualism, participation, multimodality, language choice, categorization, identity)*

This study examines how deadlines and time limits for conference talks organize the discourse of consensus among collaborating experimental and theoretical physicists in a university laboratory Six months of videotaped observations, including two cycles of conference talk preparation, indicate that, as the date of an upcoming conference nears, several things happen (a)Co-authoring physicists usually have not achieved agreement on all aspects of the findings (b)They nevertheless direct their energies to constructing a hybrid presentation rhetoric that satisfies the co-authors and fits the talk to the official conference talk time limit (c) In the process of working through matters of rhetoric – what to say, what to display visually, what to leave out, and in what order the information should be presented – the physicists construct a working consensus on matters of physics theory and experimental data explaining the properties and dynamics of the physical universe (Scientific discourse, consensus, temporal organization, rhetoric )

Although oral histories about the Holocaust are increasingly important sources of public commemoration, as well as data for historians, they also provide opportunities for survivors to recount life stories that describe intensely personal and painful memories. One type of memory concerns relationships with significant and familiar “others.” By analyzing the linguistic construction (through variation in the use of referring terms and reported speech) of two relationships (with mother and friends) in one Holocaust survivor's life story, this article shows how survivors' life stories position “others” within both their own lives and more broadly construed matrices of cultural archetypes and historically contingent identities (victim, survivor, bystander).

Following the return of sovereignty from Britain to China, Hong Kong has undergone significant sociopolitical and educational changes. This study is a quantitative investigation of the language attitudes of 1,048 secondary students from the first postcolonial generation brought up amid the significant changes after the political handover. The results show that the respondents feel the most integratively inclined to Cantonese (the vernacular variety), and they perceive English (the colonizers' language) as the language of the highest instrumental value and social status, while Putonghua (the language of the new ruler) is rated the lowest from both the integrative and the instrumental perspectives. Unlike what has been predicted by scholars, Putonghua has not yet taken the place of English as the language of power. Despite this, there are signs of a subtle transition toward an accommodating attitude to Putonghua, mainly induced by the growing instrumental value of the language for economic purposes.

The development of digital communication technologies not only has an influence on human communicative practices, but also creates new spaces for human collaborative activity. In this article we discuss a technologically mediated context for interaction, computer games. Closely looking at interactions among a group of gamers, we examine how players are managing complex, shifting frameworks of participation, the virtual game world and the embodied world of talk and plans for action. Introducing the notion of participation cues, we explain how interactants are able to orient to, plan, and execute collaborative actions that span quite different environments with quite different types of agency, possible acts, and consequences. Novel abilities to interact across diverse spaces have consequences for understanding how humans build coordinated action through efficient, multimodal communication mechanisms. (Computer-mediated communication, language and technology, gaming, gesture, participation, multimodality)*

In this article I focus on the influence of researcher/informant roles on the types of narratives that are produced and on the ways in which storytelling interactions are managed in research contexts. In particular, I show that storytelling activities and story types both reflect and shape relationships among participants based, among other factors, on their local management of situational and portable identities. I argue that one important methodological consequence of the analysis is the recognition of the fact that all data produced in interaction (including interviews) are irreducibly context-bound and that therefore an analytical separation between observer and observed is impossible. I also discuss how a treatment of the research event and of storytelling in it as a real interactional encounter can shed light on issues related to the insider-outsider status of the researcher and the Observer's Paradox (Labov 1972b). (Narrative, interviews, interactional roles, immigrants, identities).

Three different Creoles spoken in Surinam are examined for their Creole origins. Saramaccan (SM) and Sranan (SN) are compared on basic vocabulary and other linguistic features and analyzed in conjunction with historical evidence. It is suggested that SN and SM speakers came to Surinam plantations with a basic knowledge of Portuguese-Creole. SN completely relexified in the direction of English, whereas SM only partly relexified toward English. Evidence suggests that Ndjuka (ND) is not a product of relexification, but developed from an eighteenth-century English pidgin. It is concluded that both ‘normal’ genetic developments and relexification may have similar results and that comparative evidence alone is not a sufficient basis for historical conclusions (comparative linguistics, creoles, relexification).

In 1962, Dell Hymes proposed the project he subsequently named the ethnography of communication (Hymes 1961, 1962, 1964b). Its central motive was to create a theory of linguistic communication which is grounded in the comparative analysis of many communities and their distinctive ways of speaking. Just as there is a comparative politics, law, religion, and so forth, he said, so should there be a comparative analysis of “studies ethnographic in basis and communicative in scope” (Hymes 1964b:9). Such studies would be “whole ethnographies focused on communicative behavior” (1964b:9) and would be guided by, and subsequently used to guide the revision of, a descriptive framework which itself is a model of sociolinguistic description.