The first section of this article argues for an approach to interruption as a participant's, not an analyst's, phenomenon. For analysts, interruption is best treated as a topic, not a resource. The second section examines how participants go about making interruptions OBSERVABLE events in the flow of interaction - in particular, the ways in which they claim violations of speaking rights. The third section considers some of the ways in which such claims are responded to. In the final section, it is suggested that there is a general need for a more systematic approach to the methods through which acts are constituted in terms of the responses they receive. (Interruption, conversation analysis, interaction)

This article is concerned with understanding situations in which speakers talk in the presence of scientific inscriptions (lectures in science classes, public presentations). Drawing on extensive video materials accumulated in middle and high school science classrooms and university lectures, we develop a framework for the resources speakers make available to their audience for understanding what the talk is about. We distinguish three situations according to the nature of reference to the phenomenon talked about: (i) talk is about phenomenon but mediated by reference to a two-dimensional (2-D) inscription; (ii) talk is about phenomenon but mediated by reference to a three-dimensional (3-D) inscription; and (iii) talk is directly about phenomenon. Associated with these three situations are different body orientations, distances from inscriptions, and types of gestures. When speakers laminate talk characteristic of two different types of situations, the orientation “up” can become “down” and “down” can become “up,” potentially leading to confusing statements.

The Tamil language has had its current standard written form since the 13th century; but because of increasing diglossia, spoken Tamil dialects have now diverged so radically from earlier norms, including the written standard (LT, or Literary Tamil) that no spoken dialect, regional or social, can function as the koiné or lingua franca. Because LT is never used for authentic informal oral communication between live speakers, there has always been a need for some sort of spoken “standard” koiné for inter-dialect communication. Aside from interpersonal communication, one hears this inter-dialect koiné most clearly in the so-called “social”film, which arose out of its antecedent, the popular or “social” drama. Conversational portions of novels and short stories also exhibit spoken forms, though not always as clearly “phonetic” as a phonetician might expect. The goal of this paper is to examine the concept of “language standardization” as it has been applied to other languages, focusing on the role of literacy and writing in this process; then to present evidence for, as well as the sources of, koinæization of "Standard Spoken Tamil"; and then to determine whether SST is in fact an emergent standard, given the challenges of literacy and writing. (Standardization, Tamil, diglossia, linguae francae, koinés)

Personal reference is the use of an expression to pick out a person, as in When did John eat the cookies? or Tell Dr. Elwood that I need to see him. This article explores the social factors involved in how speakers choose a referring expression in a given situation. Five experiments were conducted which presented speakers with scenarios and asked them how they would refer to a particular person in that situation. The results showed that speakers were sensitive to the level of intimacy between the speaker and referent, between the addressee and referent, and between a nonparticipating audience and the referent. To a lesser degree, the relation between the speaker and the addressee also influenced choice of referring expression. The results can be explained by a theory that posits that speakers are attempting to preserve their faces and the faces of their addressees in choosing these terms, and so they avoid references that could be face threatening. This theory can be integrated with current theories of object reference and the choice of address terms. (Reference, address, politeness, personal reference)

Ferguson's concept of diglossia is examined with a view to dedetermining its applicability to creole continua. The characteristics of classic instances of diglossia are subdivided into sociocultural and linguistic features, and these in turn are used as a basis for determining the extent to which different types of community might be fruitfully described as diglossic. The conclusion is drawn that creole continua share far more in common with Ferguson's defining cases of diglossia than they do not, and far more than other types of speech community. (Diglossia, Creole continua, Typology of speech communities)

Informed by recent work on the commodification of language and identity, this article offers a critique of the neoliberal corporate discourse of “diversity management,” in which the diversity of the workforce is conceived as a resource for maximizing profit. Through a close analysis of the language ideologies deployed in an interaction between three mid-level managers at a multinational corporation and a researcher, this article shows how the discourse of diversity management, constituting a metadiscursive regime, works to rationalize and justify the inequalities of the global workplace through the specific ways in which older and newer discourses of language and identity are juxtaposed. The findings emphasize how sociolinguistic research may contribute to a deeper understanding of the conditions of work in the new economy by identifying language as an indispensable part of the mechanism that sustains processes of control. (Metadiscursive regime, diversity management, neoliberalism, work, language ideology)*

Based on the bilingualism literature, the author's recent experiences in Austrian German, and a discourse analysis perspective, a way of looking at biculturalism is hammered together to enable an understanding of how adult L2 acquisition proceeds in more and less cultural ways. (Bilingualism, biculturalism, discourse, ethnography, Whorf)

This paper discusses the use of the title of address, tóngzhì ‘comrade’, in the People's Republic of China today. Empirical data are presented which were gathered to test a set of hypotheses about the unmarked and marked uses of this term. In its unmarked sense, it is a neutral term of address implying conventionalized solidarity. However, in its marked sense its use becomes a negotiation to change the social distance between Speaker and Addressee. We argue that tóngzhì has variable meanings and uses because its usage represents a language change in progress. Finally, we propose a general hypothesis that variation in linguistic forms such as tóngzhì is exploited by speakers to negotiate rights and obligations within a talk exchange. Speakers use the ambiguity which variable meanings and uses create as a cover for negotiating interpersonal position without going on record. We suggest that this possibility to exploit variation may explain how certain structures evolve in language and why they are maintained. (Sociolinguistics, conversational analysis, language change, terms of address, markedness, Chinese)

This article explores the roles that language and the body play in the iconization of cross-modal personae (see Agha 2003, 2004). Focusing on a community of radical drag queens in San Francisco, I analyze the interplay of visual presentation and acoustic dimensions of /s/ in the construction of the fierce queen persona, which embodies an extreme, larger-than-life, and anti-normative type of femininity. Taking data from transformations—conversations during which queens visually transform from male-presenting into their feminine drag personae—I explore the effect of fluid visual presentation on linguistic production, and argue that changes in both the linguistic and visual streams increasingly invoke qualia (see Gal 2013; Harkness 2015) projecting ‘harshness’ and ‘sharpness’ in the construction of fierce femininity. I argue that personae like the fierce queen become iconized through rhematization (see Gal 2013), a process in which qualic congruences are construed and constructed across multiple semiotic modalities. (Iconization, rhematization, qualia, sociophonetics, gender, personae, drag queens)*

Deaf people who form part of a Deaf community communicate using a shared sign language. When meeting people from another language community, they can fall back on a flexible and highly context-dependent form of communication called international sign, in which shared elements from their own sign languages and elements of shared spoken languages are combined with pantomimic elements. Together with the fact that there are few shared sign languages, this leads to a very different global language situation for deaf people as compared to the situation for spoken languages and hearing people as analyzed in de Swaan (2001). We argue that this very flexibility in communication and the resulting global communication patterns form the core of deaf culture and a key component of the characterization of deaf people as “visual people.” (Globalization, sign language, international sign, Deaf culture, language contact, multilingualism)*

Quantitative analyses of large data sets make use of both linguistic and sociological categories in sociolinguistic studies. While the linguistic categories are generally well-defined and there are sufficient tokens for further definition based on mathematical manipulation, the social characteristics such as socioeconomic class or ethnicity are neither. The familiar problem of grouping speakers by such sociological characteristics prior to quantitative analysis is addressed and an alternative solution – principal components analysis – is suggested. Principal components analysis is used here as a heuristic for grouping speakers solely on the basis of linguistic behaviour; the groups thus defined can then be described according to sociological characteristics. In addition, by naming the principal components, the major linguistic and social dimensions of the variation in the data can be identified. Principal components analysis was applied to vowel variation data collected as part of a sociolinguistic survey of English in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. (Sociolinguistics, variation studies, quantitative methods in linguistics, dialectology, Australian English, role of migrants in language change)

This article assesses the historical failures and limits of the dominant ‘error correction’ approach within sociolinguistics. The error correction approach supposes that social change can be achieved when knowledge is shared by researchers with the public or figures of institutional authority. This article reviews reflections on sociolinguists’ work toward social change, especially those of Labov, through scholarship in language ideologies and critical race theory. From a language ideological and critical race perspective, error correction is limited in its engagement with marginalizing representations of language because it does not jointly address material conditions and social positions supported by these representations. Exemplifying these limitations, sociolinguistic error-correction efforts that address the evaluation of language practices racialized as Black may have unfortunately distracted from social change agendas that confront material and institutionalized racism directly. To address these limitations, this article highlights existing critical reflexive scholarship that explicitly interrogates disciplinary assumptions. (Critical race theory, error correction, language ideologies, social change, critical reflexivity)*

Feminist scholars have begun to ask how existing conceptual schemes and organizational structures in academic disciplines have excluded women and feminist ideas, and to provide suggestions for transformation. One strand of this work has been the exploration of how canons of thought are constructed in such fields as economics, sociology, and sociocultural anthropology. This article begins such an investigation for sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology by reviewing how gender correlates with publication and citation over a 35-year period (1965–2000) in five key journals, and in 16 textbooks published in the 1990s. It describes some marked differences in the publication of works by women and on gender in the five journals, as well as some significant differences in the degree to which men and women cite the work of women. It also considers how the rate of publication of articles on sex, gender, and women is correlated with publication of female authors. It concludes with a discussion of the implications of this study for changing institutional practices in our field.

The It Gets Better project has been held up as a model of successful social media activism. This article explores how narrators of It Gets Better videos make use of generic intertextuality, strategically combining the canonical narrative genres of the exemplum, the testimony, and the confession in a way that allows them to claim ‘textual authority’ and to make available multiple moral positions for themselves and their listeners. This strategy is further facilitated by the ambiguous participation frameworks associated with digital media, which make it possible for storytellers to tell different kinds of stories to different kinds of listeners at the same time, to simultaneously comfort the victims of anti-gay violence, confront its perpetrators, and elicit sympathy from ‘onlookers’. This analysis highlights the potential of new practices of online storytelling for social activism, and challenges notions that new media are contributing to the demise of common narrative traditions. (Activism, digital media, genre, LGBT discourse, narrative, positioning)*

Children in Hawaii who have some Polynesian ancestry have been observed to engage frequently in a pattern of verbal disputing that is characterized by the forceful use of ‘Not!’ as an outright contradiction by one speaker of another. This paper describes the pattern and its development from early childhood into adolescence and the context of relationships in which it develops.

Social constructivist approaches to style have moved away from the cognitive asymmetry that underpinned Labov's original attention-to-speech model, namely that a first-learned vernacular often has cognitive primacy. This study explores the interplay of cognitive and interactional effects in style variation. It reports on three related dynamics of style variation in one individual—Fareed Zakaria, an Indian-American media personality. First, we see Zakaria's robust English bidialectalism with American and Indian audiences. This strong audience effect is complicated by the second finding, which points to asymmetric style dominance in Zakaria's first-learned Indian style, which he subtly defaults to regardless of audience when his attention is diverted by such tasks as quickly counter-arguing or inserting parenthetical information. The third part of the study relates style dominance to agency: In a reflexive intra-personal process of biographical indexicality, speakers such as Zakaria may exploit their personal style biography and use their dominant variety to perform no-nonsense ‘real me’ stances in interaction. (Audience, attention, style variation, indexicality, repertoire, processing, bidialectalism, second dialect acquisition, speech rate)*

This article revisits Labov's (1962, 1972a) germinal sociolinguistic work on Martha's Vineyard speech, providing a synchronic analysis of the /ay/ diphthong in words like right and time, and, in turn, a diachronic perspective on a sound change in progress. Labov observed that the first element of the /ay/ diphthong was raised in the speech of Martha's Vineyarders, particularly fishermen, and he correlated it with social factors like identity (i.e., local heritage) and resistance to summer visitors. The present authors provide a sociolinguistic analysis of /ay/ from a new set of data collected in a Martha's Vineyard speech community. The outcome suggests a change in the linguistic pattern observed by Labov, which the authors argue is linked to socio-economic restructuring and resulting ideological changes taking place on the island. The acoustic and social factors are analyzed using VARBRUL to show how /ay/ variation today patterns with various internal and external factors found to be salient in Labov's earlier study.

England has had a schools inspectorate since 1839, first in the form of Her Majesty's Inspectorate (HMI), and since 1992, in the form of the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills (Ofsted). The inspectorate, a workforce made up of a majority of white inspectors, conduct regular inspections of all state schools in England, producing reports which comment on various aspects of educational provision, including teachers’ and students’ spoken language. In this article we deploy a raciolinguistic genealogy to examine the listening practices of the inspectorate, drawing on historical inspection reports generated from archival work, inspectorate language policy, and a large corpus of contemporary reports. We show how raciolinguistic ideologies are deeply embedded into the sociopolitical culture of the inspectorate, and how these ideologies translate into systems of sonic surveillance in which the nonstandardised language practices of students and teachers are heard as impoverished, deficient, and unsuitable for school. (Raciolinguistics, schools, language policing, standardised English, Ofsted, England, social class, ideology)

The process of the attempted acquisition of spoken Welsh by English speakers in Wales is examined ethnographically in relation to the native association of Welsh-language speech with a Welsh cultural identity. Perceptions of Welsh learners by members of other linguistic groups reveal the symbolic significance of the learning of a minority language. The status of learners as verbal performers is investigated, together with the psychological impact of that status and of the ambiguity of the learners' identity on the learning process. (Bilingualism, language learning, Wales/Welsh)

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is often implicitly assumed to be true independent of its empirical status. Feminist attempts to eliminate the generic he must assume that language somehow affects thought, since there is no intrinsic harm in the word itself. Research to date has, in fact, shown that generic he tends to suggest a male referent in the mind of the reader. This study asks whether people's interpretation of a generic sentence varies depending on whether or not they have followed feminist proposals and reformed their own language. Fifty-five college students read sex-indefinite paragraphs involving either the generic he, he or she, or they, and made drawings to represent the mental images evoked by what they read. The sex of the figure drawn was the dependent variable. Students' term papers were used to determine whether their own language was “reformed” or “traditional.” He was found to be least likely to evoke female referents, he or she most likely, and they in between. However, regardless of the pronoun, men drew more male and fewer female pictures than women. Moreover, whereas men did not differ in their imagery, whether their language was reformed or traditional, women did. Traditional-language women had more male images than female. Reformed-language women showed the opposite. Results are discussed in terms of the theory of social identity (Tajfel 1981), and it is concluded that the weak, correlational form of Whorf's thesis applies to women, the group that initiated the reform in the first place. (Gender and language, pronouns, social psychology of language, Sapir–Whorf hypothesis)