This article describes the construction of a corpus of spoken French with a time depth of a century and a half, the Récits du français québécois d'autrefois (RFQ). The folktales, local legends, and interviews constituting the RFQ were produced by speakers born between 1846 and 1895. They spoke the French of 19th-century rural Québec, a variety shown to be replete with the vernacular structures and inherent variability of contemporary dialects. The authors review the advantages and drawbacks associated with this type of diachronic material, and argue that, exploited judiciously, it effectively represents an earlier stage of spoken French. They show how systematic comparison of the RFQ with contemporary vernaculars can help pinpoint the existence, date, and direction of language change.The research on which this article is based was generously funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a Killam Research Fellowship to Poplack. We are very grateful to friends and colleagues Diane Vincent and Claude Poirier of Université Laval, and especially to archivist M. Jean Coulombe and the staff at the Archives of Folklore there. Without their precious collaboration, this project could not have come to fruition. Carmen LeBlanc and Lauren Willis collected much of the data for the RFQ, and, along with Lyne Klapka and Dawn Harvie, also participated in corpus transcription and correction. Our thanks to them and the other members of the research team at the Sociolinguistics Laboratory, University of Ottawa, for their painstaking work.

As the principal occasion for establishing cooperation between family and school, the parent-teacher conference is crucial to the social and educational lives of children. But there is a problem: reports of parent-teacher conflict pervade extant literature. Previous studies do not, however, explain how conflict emerges in real time or how conflict is often avoided during conferences. This article examines a diverse corpus of video-recorded naturally occurring conferences to elucidate a structural preference organization operative during parent-teacher interaction that enables participants to forestall conflict. Focusing on teachers' conduct around student-praise and student-criticism, this investigation demonstrates that teachers do extra interactional work when articulating student-criticism. This research explicates two of teachers' most regular actions constituting this extra work: obfuscating responsibility for student-troubles by omitting explicit reference to the student, and routinizing student-troubles by invoking other comparable cases of that same trouble. Analysis illuminates teachers' work to maintain solidarity with students, and thus parents. (Institutional interaction, parent-teacher conferences, conversation analysis, criticism, praise, evaluating students, assessments, preference organization)*

In this article, we examine the way citizens' descriptions of troublesome occurrences in reports to emergency dispatch personnel are vulnerable to suspicion and doubt. The vulnerability of description in these cases involves callers' categorization of, visual or aural access to, and involvement in the reported “trouble.” It is through displays of what we term practical epistemology – displays of how one has come to know about a particular event – that these vulnerabilites emerge and are tested and negotiated in the request for and dispatch of emergency assistance. (Conversation analysis, language in institutional settings, pragmatics)

Since the 1970s, it has been assumed that the diverse languages of plantation laborers in Hawai‘i had little effect on the development of Hawai‘i Creole English (HCE); this view supported theories that emphasize the role of innate linguistic universals in creolization. But recent research has revealed (a) widespread bilingualism among locally born children of laborers before HCE emerged, and (b) the dominance of two ethnic groups at the time – the Chinese and Portuguese. This article re-examines the issue of substrate influence in HCE by concentrating on these two groups. Socio-historical and linguistic evidence is presented to show the likelihood that the Cantonese and Portuguese substrates reinforced and expanded various features of existing pidgins that had diffused to Hawai‘i. Portuguese also appears to be the origin of several key features of HCE which differ from those of other creoles. The implications of these findings for universalist theories of creole genesis are discussed.

This study examines the types of interactional trouble that arise from narrative variation in institutional interviews. Specifically, we examine protective order interviews in which Latina women tell of domestic violence to paralegal interviewers charged with the duty of helping them obtain a protective order. Victims' narratives are shown to take different shapes, and paralegals respond to them in different pragmalinguistic ways, depending on how they diverge from institutional needs. The factors found most heavily to influence narrative outcomes are contextual ones, related to participant social roles, the type of communicative activity interlocutors perceive themselves to be engaged in, and their interactional goals. An additional finding is that when expectations of what constitutes appropriate speech behavior differ, the interlocutor holding greater institutional power will try to constrain the speech of the other, despite the fact that both appear to share an extralinguistic goal, in this case obtaining a protective order.

This article examines narratives of professional experience in a corpus of forty interviews in which English to Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) teachers reflect on their professional life histories as well as their current teaching. The notion of “stance” emerged as a major theme: the teachers positioned themselves in relation to the policy environment, to learners, teaching and learning, and their sense of control in their working lives. Narrative was an important discursive resource for doing so and a range of narrative types (personal, generic/iterative, hypothetical, exemplum, and ‘negated’) are identified, each demonstrating performance features. Using Dubois's (2007) definition of stance, I examine the dynamic relationship between stance taking and discursive positioning, discussing the role of performance in these processes. Shifts into performance are shown to depend on participant roles and alignments in the interviews rather than on particular narrative types. Thus, the data contradicts some of Wolfson's (1976) observations on narratives in the research interview. The analysis contributes to our understanding of the research interview as a dynamically co-constructed speech genre rather than as a neutral locus for gathering data. (Professional narrative, performance, stance, alignment, positioning)

Three different regional pairs of jugular and facial motions used in Europe for habitual expression of approval and dissent are analyzed with reference to the iconic grounds of these three semiotic oppositions. (semiotics, face-to- face interaction, kinesics, European ethnology.)

While information sources have largely been treated as transparent categories in the literature on evidentiality, understandings of information source can be culturally and situationally variable. This article proposes that the strictly linguistic information encoded in reportative evidentials cannot be cleanly separated from social influences. Defining an information source, especially when referring to information reported by another person, serves social purposes, such as casting doubt, framing gossip, distancing oneself, or indicating empathy. Using the concept of speaker stance, this study explores the relationship of information source to the interpersonal relationships and interactions that are encoded in this linguistic form. Data from a contact variety of Spanish spoken in central Bolivia provide evidence that diz(que), a Spanish word, has undergone influence from Quechua to become a systematic reportative evidential marker in this variety of Bolivian Spanish. Speakers use information source marking in order to shade subtleties of relationships and authority. (Evidentiality, speaker stance, Andean Spanish, Bolivian Spanish, language contact, linguistic anthropology)*

In 1977, a bilingual education project began in rural areas of Puno, Peru, as a direct result of Peru's 1972 Education Reform. This paper presents results of an ethnographic and sociolinguistic study comparing Quechua language use and maintenance between: 1) a bilingual education school and community, and 2) a nonbilingual education school and community. Classroom observation indicated a significant change in teacher–pupil language use and an improvement in pupil participation in the bilingual education school. Community observation and interviews indicated that community members both valued and used their language. Yet the project has had difficulties expanding or even maintaining its implementation. (Quechua; Puno, Peru; Peru; Andes; bilingual education; classroom language use; ethnography; sociolinguistics; community development; language planning; language maintenance; educational policy)

The paper is concerned with the changing address norms in China since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. The first part of the paper deals with the term tóngzhì ‘comrade’ as well as some other address terms relevant to it. Emphasis is on the discussion of why official titles rather than tóngzhì are preferred by certain Chinese officials. The second part focuses on how traditional address terms such as xiānsheng ‘Mr.’, tàitai ‘Mrs.’ and xiaojie ‘Miss’ have undergone changes; and the third part refers to the use of the second singular pronouns of both the regular form ní and the honorific ním. The paper also reports on the changes in some other aspects including address terms to women and some proper names relevant to address. (Address, language change, Chinese linguistics, anthropological linguistics, politics of language)

Is language simply a medium for the expression of intentions, motives, or interests, or is it also a site for uncovering the method through which ordered activity is generated? This question has wide-ranging implications for the study of bilingual interaction in particular, and for sociolinguistics generally. This article attempts to explicate the principles behind the Conversation Analysis (CA) approach to bilingual interaction. It addresses some of the criticisms that have been leveled against the CA approach, using both new data and new analyses of previously published examples. (Keywords: Conversation Analysis, bilingual interaction, code-switching).*

This article argues that self-expression is a crucial though heretofore largely overlooked part of the explanation for linguistic variation. Self-expression mediates between linguistic choices and social facts such as gender, occupation, linguistic ideology, and place of origin, as speakers use language not only to express their identification with or rejection of social groupings, but also to express their individuality. All language use is thus essentially idiosyncratic and syncretic. The point is illustrated with reference to case studies of the speech and writing of two Texas women who use language in public contexts. The article further argues for the sociolinguistic study of public modes of discourse in addition to “vernacular” modes, and for the need in sociolinguistic research for rhetorical as well as linguistic analysis. (Variation, self-expression, individuality, case studies, Texas, public speech)

This article looks at Spanish-Estonian speaking families and their language ideologies in relation to language use in the family setting—how parents decide to use languages among themselves and with their children. Family members choose different languages for different purposes when they talk to one another. In our study, parents draw on their knowledge of the ‘one parent–one language’ strategy but also translanguage for different reasons, constructing new patterns of bilingual modes. In the article, we examine parents’ attitudes towards language maintenance, transmission, and use with their children. We incorporate the lens of ‘new speaker’ research to analyse the empirical data collected in Tallinn households among Spanish-Estonian speaking families so as to contribute to a better understanding of family language policy, planning, and management, highlighting how macro-level sociolinguistic expectations and norms might be elaborated on the micro level in everyday social interactions. (Family language policy, language ideology, new speakers, Estonian, Spanish)*

This article is about the discursive pathway of grammatical structures such as y'a bon ‘there's good’, documenting how, in Hexagonal France, it has become an ‘enregistered emblem’ for indexing sub-Saharan Africans and, by extension, any African as allegedly incapable of speaking French competently. I argue that tracing pathways makes it possible to unveil the intricacy of the historicities of production, circulation, and interpretations of such racially based linguistic stereotypes. One of the central questions addressed in this article is: What are the sociohistorical conditions of the emergence and maintenance of these linguistic stereotypes? I show that these are grounded in long-standing linguistic ideologies of French as an exceptional language and of African languages and, therefore, their speakers, as primitive. I demonstrate how the rise of first age mass culture in the nineteenth century contributed to both the entextualization and the circulation of these stereotypical representations. (Stereotypes, mediatization, enregisterment, language ideology, France, Africa)*

The investigation of isolated African American enclave communities has been instrumental in reformulating the historical reconstruction of earlier African American English and the current trajectory of language change in African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This case study examines a unique enclave sociolinguistic situation – a small, long-term, isolated bi-ethnic enclave community in the mountains of western North Carolina – to further understanding of the role of localized dialect accommodation and ethnolinguistic distinctiveness in the historical development of African American English. The examination of a set of diagnostic phonological and morphosyntactic variables for several of the remaining African Americans in this community supports the conclusion that earlier African American English largely accommodated local dialects while maintaining a subtle, distinctive ethnolinguistic divide. However, unlike the situation in some other African American communities, there is no current movement toward an AAVE external norm for the lone isolated African American teenager; rather, there is increasing accommodation to the local dialect. Contact-based, identity-based, and ideologically based explanations are appealed to in describing the past and present direction of change for the African Americans in this receding community.

Investigations of inequality within the courtroom have mostly examined ways in which discourse structure and rules of use constrain witnesses. This article goes beyond interactional practices to deal with four central language ideologies, which both facilitate these practices and impact on the interpretation and understanding of what people say in evidence. The article further shows that language ideologies can have much wider consequences beyond the courtroom. Focusing on language ideologies involved in storytelling and retelling in cross-examination, and using an Australian example, the article traces the recontextualization of part of a witness's story from an initial investigative interview to cross-examination, then to its evaluation in closing arguments and the judicial decision, as well as its (mis)representation in the print media. The analysis reveals the role of these language ideologies in the perpetuation of neocolonial control over Australian Aboriginal people. (Language ideologies, courtroom talk, cross-examination, decontextualization, recontextualization, neocolonial control, Australia)*

Several urban language studies over the past fifteen years have convinvigly established the links between a speaker's language and her ot his age, sex, and social class, yet very much more remains to be said about individual differences within these variable groups. Several linguists (e.g., Gumperz 1976; Rusell 1977; Bickerton 1975) havee made observations similar to Le Page (1968) that “the individual creates his system of verbal behaviour so as to resemble those common to the group or groups with he wishes from time to time to be identified”. This hypothesis is strikingly similar to Giles & Powesland's (1975) proposals for applying accommodation theory to explain linguistic code-switching.

Call centres have been widely criticised as standardised workplaces, and the imposition of calling scripts is often characterised as dehumanising and deskilling. But these accounts lack close analysis of how scripts are actually produced, taken up, and used by call-centre workers, and they are generally locked into dualistic analyses of control and resistance. In contrast, this article combines long-term ethnography with transcontextual analysis of the production, circulation and uptake of calling scripts. This reveals a good deal of collective and individual agency in processes of text-adaptation, and produces a rather more nuanced picture of work in a call centre. (Call centres, text trajectories, linguistic ethnography, standardisation)*

Numbers are used for exact and approximative estimations. The numbers used in approximative expressions are typically so-called round numbers, such as 10, 20, 25, 30, 40, 50, 100, 1,000, and such numbers are also very frequent in texts. This article presents evidence that some numbers are rounder than others and discusses how the roundness of a number can be derived from its contents of the base number of the numeral System of the culture. A formula for deriving the roundness of a number is suggested, and some evidence that intuitions about roundness vary between vigesimal and decimal cultures as predicted by the formula is given. (Number, numeral, decimal, vigesimal, money, anthropology, sociolinguistics, language and culture, English, French, Swedish)

This article addresses the issue of the conversational floor. Using data from classroom discourse, covering a wide range of floor related phenomena, the authors propose a concept of the floor that ties it to the activity in hand, and the local flexible organization of talk within that activity. After beginning with a short review of current work relating to the conversational floor, discussion turns to extracts from data as examples of various types of activities requiring different structures of participation. The aim is to move from binary definitions of the floor, particularly the opposition between one-at-a-time and collaborative, and toward a conceptualization of the floor as a continuum between “tighter” and “looser” organizations of talk in the activity.