This article examines International Sign (IS), a mode of signed cross-linguistic communication, in the context of the World Federation of the Deaf (WFD). I contend that the WFD General Assembly's language policy, which bans interpreters and requires that delegates use IS, formalizes the commonsense deaf notion that what is particular about deaf people is their capacity for connecting across differences, rooted in and materialized through the ability to use sign across language boundaries. While such an ability has been explained primarily in terms of the affordances of the visual-gestural modality, this article foregrounds and theorizes the irreducibly relational dimensions of linguistic commensuration. I argue that communicating in IS relies on and produces mutual moral orientation among signers, and that ultimately, it is the labor involved in using IS that deaf people value and that the WFD General Assembly institutionalizes. (International Sign, sign language, deaf, linguistic commensuration, moral orientation)*

This article argues for an account of language shift that focuses on ideological conflicts and competing discourses of language, identity, and progress in Tlaxcala, Mexico. The study is based on ethnographic research on patterns of language use, ideology, and boundary differentiation in several Mexicano (Nahuatl)-speaking communities in the Malintzi region of Central Mexico. Metadiscursive practices consisting of three discourses that have local, regional, and national expressions are analyzed: the pro-development metadiscourse of salir adelante, ‘forging ahead’ and improving one's socioeconomic position; the discourse of menosprecio, denigration of indigenous identity; and the pro-indígena or pro-indigenous discourse that promotes a positive attitude toward indigenous identity. Analysis of these discourses offers an understanding of the semiotic resources speakers employ as they orient toward and against particular identities that are both “traditional” and “modern,” as they respond to changing social and economic circumstances. It is concluded that a focus on individuals and communities, through ethnography and discourse analysis, is of critical importance to understanding how and why speakers shift their ideologies and their languages.

This article presents a variationist analysis of the bought vowel in New York City English (NYCE) and finds that it has reversed the trajectory of change outlined in Labov (1966). An acoustic analysis of production data from sixty-four native residents of the Lower East Side demonstrates that bought is lowering in apparent time, a change led by young people, white and Jewish speakers, and the middle classes. A second source of data comes from perceptions of raised bought gathered from a matched guise experiment, which highlights an indexical field (Eckert 2008) of social meanings for raised bought that comprise a ‘classic New Yorker’ persona: an older, white ethnic New Yorker from the outer boroughs who is mean and aloof. Taken together, the data suggest that bought's reversal is motivated by its contemporary social meanings. (bought, New York City English, dialectology, variationism, sound change, social meaning, perception, sociophonetics)*

This article examines the descriptive power of the adjacency pair as a basic unit of conversational organization. It applies the notion to the analysis of conversational data and points out that there are utterances which are important contributions to the conversation and yet for which the notion fails to account. They are utterances which are not the component parts of an adjacency pair and yet form a bounded unit with it. This raises the question of which is more adequate as a basic unit of conversational organization: a three-part exchange or an adjacency pair? This article proposes that it is the former, based on the observation that the third part of an exchange is a very important element of conversational interaction, and that when it does not occur, it is often withheld for social or strategic reasons. The article argues for the nontrivial absence of the third part by showing its relevance of occurrence (Sacks 1972:342). An investigation is made of its functions by examining where, when, and why it does not occur, and where, when, and why it does occur in conversation. The discussion is exemplified by face-to-face and telephone conversation data. (Sociolinguistics, ethnomethodology, discourse analysis, pragmatics)

Speakers from a semi-rural community within the Jamaican Creole continuum were asked what kind of linguistic entity they believe the Creole to be, where it is in use, whom they understand to be its users, and which domains they deem appropriate and inappropriate for its use. A language-attitude interview schedule yielding an Attitude Indicator Score (AIS) was developed for use in this community. This schedule contained two sets of questions, attitude and description questions, which were designed to capture information concerning overt and covert language attitudes. Results show respondents' attitude systems to be multi-valued: They were generally ambivalent in their attitudes toward Jamaican Creole, but they judged it appropriate or inappropriate for use in different contexts according to their social distance from or solidarity with an interlocutor. Gender grading and an age × gender effect were found. This paper is considerably expanded from a presentation made at NWAV 24, October 12–15, 1995. Fieldwork for this study was supported by a grant from the University of Michigan, Program in Linguistics. For their advice and insightful comments, I thank Lesley Milroy, John Rickford, an anonymous reviewer, and William Bright. My deepest thanks go to members of the Gordon Town community, particularly the principal and students of the Gordon Town All-Age School, who shared with me their facilities, their ideas, and their interest in the topic. Ken Guire, James Lepkowski, and Rose Venzuela provided assistance in the statistical analysis of data. After all this support and more, any errors and shortcomings of this study are the sole responsibility of this author.

This article is inspired by the typology of “dialect/standard constellations” outlined in Auer (2005, 2011), which aims to detect common dynamics in the current processes of dialect/standard convergence in Europe. The specific sociolinguistic situation addressed in this article involves Italian, Piedmontese, and Occitan in Piedmont, a northwestern region of Italy. We analyze a set of linguistic features with the aim of depicting the dynamics of intralinguistic and interlinguistic convergence as they relate to the ongoing standardization processes in these languages. Some adjustments to the two types of repertoires drawn by Auer (diaglossia and endoglossic medial diglossia) are proposed to better suit them, respectively, to the Italo-Romance continuum between Piedmontese rural dialects and standard Italian (which actually consists of two separate subcontinua with intermediate varieties) and to the relationship between Occitan dialects and their planned standard variety (as well as that between Piedmontese and its “Frenchified” standard variety). (Language standardization, dialect/standard convergence, Italian, Piedmontese, Occitan.)*

This article examines the distribution of speech acts based on the word sore ‘sorry’ in Bislama, the creole language spoken in Vanuatu. Three functions of these “apology” routines are identified and analyzed within the framework of politeness theory. Women are shown to use sore more frequently over all than men; they are also found to use sore to express empathy with the referent/addressee. Empathy is expressed in men's speech in other ways. The asymmetric distribution of sore is shown to make sense, given wider societal beliefs about and attitudes toward appropriate behaviors for women and men. Given a strict definition of a “community of practice,” it is clear that this shared speech behavior does not mean that women in this speech community can be said to form a community of practice. Analyses based on the speech community and intergroup distinctiveness are more useful in understanding this variation. This article has benefited from discussions with other members of the Language and Gender panel at the 6th ICLASP meeting, University of Ottawa, May 1997, especially Janet Holmes. Some of the data were also presented at the Second British Roundtable on Social Theory in Sociolinguistics, University of Wales, Cardiff, July 1997; discussions there with Ben Rampton and John Heritage were very helpful. My early thoughts were shaped in conversations with Herbert Morris and Gillian Sankoff. None of the aforementioned necessarily agree with the analysis presented here. Many thanks to the Wenner-Gren Foundation for their generous support in the field (#5742).

Despite considerable recent research on child discourse, there has been little controlled cross-cultural work. Numerous valuable studies of children's speech events in specific societies are available, but comparisons are largely anecdotal and informal. Similarly, several analytical schemata have been developed to deal with particular types of discourse in particular societies (see, for example, Sinclair & Coulthard 1975; Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson 1974 Brenneis & Lein 1977; Watson & Boggs 1977), but their applicability in other contexts has not been tested. Comparative research is necessary both to test the generality of interpretations of child discourse based on research in one society and to explore the cross-cultural utility of analytical methods.

Creole identity in Louisiana acquired diverse meanings for several ethnic groups during the French and Spanish regimes, before and after the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, and through the last part of the 20th century. In spite of a strong shift toward “Black” identity by many African Americans in the state, those who are fluent Creole French speakers now seem to be the repository of Louisiana Creole identity. This article presents a diachronic study of the different meanings applied to Creole identity which resulted from dramatic social, political, and economic changes. It also delimits and defines the actual attributes of Creole identity within two representative African American communities. Because of the historical and political conditions underlying Creole identity, African Americans who still identify as Creoles insist on linguistic attributes, rather than on the criterion of race, as essential characteristics of their ethnic identity.

‘Sweet voice’, a distinctive Japanese vocal style, illustrates the role played by voice quality as a marker of authenticity in the construction of linguistic styles. The acoustic properties and sociopragmatic functions of sweet voice, as performed by professional voice actresses, are analyzed using data from anime programs, paraphernalia, and fan discourse. Sweet voice is shown to be connected to a traditional notion of Japanese femininity, and licenses the positive use of grammatical features of Japanese Women's Language. The mature, traditional image conveyed by sweet voice contrasts with the youthful cuteness of burikko and related vocal styles, illustrating that multiple notions of femininity operate within Japanese popular culture. The interplay of voice quality and grammatical features suggests that perceptions of conscious control at different levels of language play a crucial role in social meaning. (Voice quality, Japanese, language and gender, style, authenticity)*

In the introduction we stated two frequently encountered a priori arguments against the variable rule methodology and attempted to refute them. The first rejects the variable rule methodology – and by implication any study of comparable data – on the grounds that variable rules govern token frequencies while generative grammar does not countenance token frequencies. We agree that variable rules are not generative rules of a new sort but an entirely different kind of logical object and that generative grammar indeed does not countenance token frequencies. But we are convinced by empirical work conducted within the variable rule paradigm that token frequencies often display clear patterns and that moreover some knowledge of these patterns forms part of the linguistic abilities of speakers. We conclude that, whatever the drawbacks of the variable rule formalism, studies employing variable rules have shown regularities in linguistic behavior that point to a serious lack in the generative paradigm, narrowly defined.

A second line of argument against variable rules which we rejected was based on assumptions about human psychology and about probability theory. The assumption that human beings cannot assess probabilities and behave in accord with them in a natural and unconscious manner appears to be supported by no empirical evidence and does not seem to us plausible a priori. Moreover, experimental evidence to the contrary exists. The argument to probability theory was that a speaker would have to have an internal counting device to keep track of the relative frequencies of linguistic variants that he had heard from his own or other lips in order to behave in accordance with variable rules. But this would require a kind of probability theory that would differ in remarkable and unspecified ways from ordinary probability theory, since the paradigmatic empirical examples of the familiar theory, such as coins, dice, decks of cards, and so on, are not possessed of memories.

This study investigates the figuration of “Spanish” as a sociocultural discourse within the context of a middle school in North Carolina, where immigration from Latin America is new, yet quickly accelerating. The school-based discourse is analyzed in terms of everyday ways of talking among students, as well as institutional ideologies and practices, which mediate national discourses about US Latinos and reinforce tropes circulated by students. Everyday ways of talking among non-Latino students suggest that Latinos—both immigrants and US born—are Spanish monolinguals who “choose” to be segregated from the English speakers. The use of Spanish by Latinos is constructed by non-Latinos as secretive and dangerous, linking local tropes about Spanish to national discourses. Consistent informal pressure against Spanish at school links to broader pressures against Spanish in the community and beyond. The discourse problematizes Latino identity formations and limits the types of identities available to Latino students. (Discursive production, Spanish, US Latinos, Latino threat narrative)*

The study is based on analysis of videotaped conversation that occurred in five different settings involving various family members and medical professionals in a single pediatric case. We examine (1) the elaboration and condensation of information through spoken and written channels; (2) the negotiation of information exchanged in interactions characterized by different participant structures; and (3) the methodological benefit of examining interaction across contexts. We find that (a) information is negotiated, as well as discovered, during the medical interviews; and (b) information exchanged is often less resilient than participants' cognitive schemas which precede and apparently outlive the exchange of information in the interaction. These findings contribute to an understanding of the negotiation of meaning as well as the creation of context in interaction. (Discourse, interactional sociolinguistics, context, doctor–patient communication, spoken and written language, schema theory)

Labov defined the linguistic variable as “a class of variants which are ordered along a continuous dimension and whose position is determined by an independent linguistic or extralinguistic variable” (1966:15). A precondition for identifying surface forms as variants of a single variable is semantic, or truth-conditional, equivalence. This requirement proves hard to apply beyond (morpho)phonology, and was subsequently relaxed into one of functional equivalence. The focus of this article is pragmatic variation and how we should interpret functional equivalence to account for this. It is proposed that the variants of a pragmatic variable share a common procedural meaning, defined as a set of instructions guiding the inferential phase of utterance interpretation. Recasting the core meaning of pragmatic variables in procedural terms allows us to co-examine alternating forms that may express different referential meanings, remaining true to the spirit of Labov's proposal, who saw linguistic variables as socially motivated clusterings of forms. (Pragmatic variation, functional equivalence, procedural meaning, Relevance Theory)*

This paper reviews the work on sociolinguistic aspects of the recent immigration of foreign workers and their families from Southern Europe and the Mediterranean countries of the Middle East and North Africa to West Germany. The continued presence of these foreigners presents almost laboratory conditions for the investigation of the initial and subsequent stages of contact-induced linguistic development in adults and children. The situation is particularly interesting here because many of the languages involved (Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese) are typologically different from each other and from German.

This study explores the correlation between notions of language and territory in the ideology of a present-day Ultraorthodox Jewish group, the Hasidim of Satmar, in the context of Jewish Ultraorthodoxy (Haredism) in general. This involves the present-day role of Yiddish vis-à-vis Hebrew, particularly in Israel. We first address the relative sanctity of a space that accommodates a closed Haredi lifestyle and of a language in which it is expressed, then contrast this with the absolute sanctity of the land of Israel and the language of Scripture both in their intensional (positive) and in their extensional (negative) dimensions, and finally examine the quasi-absolute sanctity with which the Yiddish language and Jewish habitat of Eastern Europe have been invested. Our conclusion is that three such cases of a parallel between linguistic and territorial ideology point to an intrinsic link. Indeed, the correlation of language and territory on the plane of quasi-absolute sanctity betokens an ongoing, active ideological tie, rather than a set of worn, petrified values evoking mere lip-service. These notions of quasi-sanctity find many echoes in reality: in the use of Yiddish and in the creation of a surrogate Eastern European lifestyle in the Haredi “ghettos.” (Cultural geography, sociolinguistics, Judaism, Hasidism, religion, Israel, sociology of language, Yiddish, sacred land, Hebrew, territory)

This study examines the role of social class and gender in an ongoing change in Spanish spoken in New York City (NYC). The change, which has to do with increasing use of Spanish subject pronouns, is correlated with increased exposure to life in NYC and to English. Our investigation of six different national-origin groups shows a connection between affluence and change: the most affluent Latino groups undergo the most increase in pronoun use, while the least affluent undergo no change. This pattern is explained as further indication that resistance to linguistic change is more pronounced in poorer communities as a result of denser social networks. In addition we find a women effect: immigrant women lead men in the increasing use of pronouns. We argue that the women effect in bilingual settings warrants a reevaluation of existing explanations of women as leaders of linguistic change. (Language change, social class, gender, bilingualism, Spanish in the US, pronouns)*

A gap exists between studies of gender and language and studies of bilingualism. The considerable attention given by studies of discourse style to gender differences in friendship patterns is not reflected in research on bilingual communities. This ethnographic case study of high school students in the Barcelona area shows that gender differences in peer group structure can affect the use of the bilingual repertoire, even when there are no apparent sex differences in second language acquisition. In this setting, girls' friendship circles are more solidary and cohesive than boys'. Moreover, girls' groups are ethnically and linguistically homogeneous, while boys' social circles can be ethnically mixed and internally differentiated linguistically. Girls' friendships set stronger constraints on language behavior. In turn, boys and girls reap different social benefits and costs for their linguistic choices, with more serious consequences for girls' social identities and acceptance by peers. (Gender, sex differences, bilingualism, peer groups, language acquisition, social networks, language shift)

This article examines how voiceless th-stopping (e.g. ting for thing) is used by a group of adolescents in Manchester, UK. The data come from an ethnographic project into the speech of fourteen to sixteen year olds who have been excluded from mainstream education. Although th-stopping is often strongly associated with black varieties of English, multiple regression analysis finds ethnicity not to be a statistically significant factor in its production. Instead, conversational context and involvement in aspects of particular social practices—grime (rap) and dancehall music—emerge as potentially more relevant. Subsequent interactional analysis adds support to this interpretation, illustrating how the feature is being used more or less strategically (and more or less successfully) by individuals in this context in order to adopt particular stances, thereby enacting particular identities that are only tangentially related to ethnicity. I argue that use of th-stopping in this context indexes a particular street identity that is made more available through participation in grime especially. (th-stopping, youth language, identity, ethnography, grime, hip hop)*

Through the analysis of the various language ideologies that have shaped the sociolinguistic history of Pijin, the lingua franca of Solomon Islands, this article attempts to shed light on the peculiar complexity of the postcolonial linguistic situations where more prestigious and less prestigious languages coexist in the same sociological niche. These ideologies are: reciprocal multilingualism, hierarchical multilingualism, linguistic pragmatism, and linguistic nationalism. Specifically, the article focuses on the development and coalescence of linguistic ideologies that lead Pijin speakers to shift perceptions of Pijin—in a context of urban identity construction that acts as a force of its own. In the case of Pijin, linguistic legitimacy seems to be lagging behind social legitimacy. We show that the development of new ideologies can lead to the re-evaluation of the meaning of symbolic domination of one language (in this case English) over another one (Pijin), without necessarily challenging this symbolic domination. (Language ideology, youth, urbanization, pidgins and creoles, Solomon Islands)*