This study of language crossing moves away from the scenes of multi-ethnic heteroglossia that have dominated the research, and turns instead to a setting affected by major conflict where the language of the traditional enemy has been introduced to secondary schools as part of a reconciliation initiative. This generates a radically different view of crossing and the environment in which it emerges: schooling counts more than popular culture; inter-generational links matter as much as peer relations; and ‘technical redoing’ is a more important key for crossing than ‘make believe’, ‘contests’, or ‘ceremonials’ (Goffman 1974). With a very different profile of this kind, crossing retains and extends its significance, pointing to a sociolinguistic practice that also occurs in official sites struggling with a legacy of violence and acute division. (Crossing, conflict legacy, language learning, classrooms, keying)*

This article considers language use in Tanzanian beauty pageants, where contestants’ onstage speech is the focus of explicit and implicit critique. In particular, contestants who speak English are far more likely to win than are their Swahili-speaking counterparts. But because English has limited circulation and is restricted to the educated elite, speaking English is, for most contestants, possible only through memorization. Local ideologies that give preference to purity over standardness mean that, while contestants’ speeches are often full of grammatical oddities, their linguistic posturing is typically well received. Yet once a contestant reaches the pinnacle of competition, expectations for language use rise, and once-successful contestants find themselves at a glass ceiling. Findings presented here point to the local and hierarchical nature of language ideologies, and to the need to account for the common practice in multilingual communities of successfully employing “incomplete” linguistic knowledge for indexical and referential effect. (Language ideology, multilingualism, Swahili, English, language purity, beauty pageants, education)*

This article explores the concept of political diglossia, a phenomenon arising in totalitarian or semitotalitarian countries, where the language of official propaganda gives rise to its opposite: the unofficial, underground language of antipropaganda. The author studies one semantic domain – the colloquial designations of the political police and security forces in contemporary Poland – and compares them with the official designations. The semantics of the relevant words and expressions is studied in great detail so that the social attitudes encoded in them can be revealed and rigorously compared. To achieve this, the author relies on the natural semantic metalanguage that she has developed over the last two decades, which has already been applied in the study of many other semantic domains, in many different languages. The social and political attitudes encoded in the Polish expressions referring to the security apparatus are discussed against the background of Poland's history. The author shows that language is not only the best “mirror of mind” (Leibniz) and “mirror of culture” and “guide to social reality” (Sapir), but also a mirror of history and politics. (Sociolinguistics, pragmatics, semantics, language of propaganda, expressive language)

Sociolinguists have not much attended to participants' terminology for events. For this, the usual ethnosemantic focus on relationships of inclusion within a taxonomic structure is insufficient. Stage-process relationships and case-grammar notions of agent, object, instrument and result are used to account for the conceptual structure encoded in a set of addict's argot terms. It is suggested that the addict's argot functions as a needed, standardized terminology, not just for concealment. (Ethnosemantics, cognitive anthropology, case grammar, generative semantics, argots.)

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, the author wishes to suggest an evolutionary typology of languages (early modern, modern, contemporary, etc.) and to specify the position of present day Japanese on this evolutionary scale. Secondly, it suggests a way to integrate the concept of linguistic modernization with a theory of language problems, and shows that for modernization at least two types of processes, macro-modernization and micro-modernization, must be distinguished. The former concerns such tasks as the establishment of a modern national language and as far as Japan is concerned this process has been completed. The latter process concerns problems such as the individual's use of language. It still awaits its completion. (Sociolinguistic typology, language evolution, linguistic modernization, Japan.)

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)*

Through an analysis of arguments in two different sets of university faculty meetings, this article attempts to demonstrate that episodes of conflict in Japanese can be treated as accomplishments at a local, interactional level. The analysis focuses on turn-taking organizations used by faculty member participants in two meetings to show how talk in one set of meetings was designed to facilitate the onset of arguments, while talk in the other set was constructed to discourage participants from exchanging statements of opposition; and that the organization of talk in the meetings, precisely because it either enabled or constrained the occurrence of arguments, was essential to the institutional work being accomplished by participants. Discussion of the analysis focuses on the tendency in research on Japanese discourse to treat conflict as an inherently disruptive phenomenon that needs to be accounted for in terms preestablished concepts such as harmony and social hierarchy.I want to express my appreciation to two anonymous reviewers for detailed comments and criticisms that were of tremendous help in revising this article. I also would like to thank Jack Bilmes, Dina R. Yoshimi, Jane Hill, and Yumiko Ohara for their valuable suggestions. In addition, I want to acknowledge the assistance of Takehiro Goto, Masaaki Hattori, Dai Kamimaru, and Toshiki Sato in gathering and transcribing the data. I alone am responsible for any errors which may remain.

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Texas death penalty trials, this article explores how language helps to make death penalty decisions possible—how specific communicative choices mediate and restrict jurors', attorneys', and judges' actions and experiences while serving and reflecting on capital trials. By analyzing postverdict interviews with jurors, trial language, and written legal language, I examine a variety of communicative practices through which defendants are dehumanized and thus considered deserving of death. This dehumanization is made possible through the physical and linguistic management of distance, which enables jurors to deny empathy with defendants and, in turn, justify their sentencing decisions. In addition, the article probes how jurors' linguistic choices can create distance between themselves and the reality of their decisions, further facilitating death sentences. (Law, empathy, deixis, agency, dehumanization, linguistic distance)*

This paper examines how Yucatec Mayan people conceive of conversations. Special attention is given to the role of narrator, respondent, and audience in those speech arts which utilize conversational genres. The conversational genres of ordinary talk, storytelling, and myth-telling in Yucatec Mayan are all dialogues. One field-recorded narrative is analyzed in detail in order to illustrate the distribution and scope of narrator and respondent speech. (Ethnography of speaking, Middle American native language use, discourse analysis, mythology and folklore performance.)

Adult–child interaction and linguistic input in relation to oral culture were investigated in 13 traditional settlements of Romāni-speaking Gypsies in Hungary. Many of the typical modifications found in the childdirected speech (CDS) register of other languages are also found in the speech addressed to children acquiring Romāni. In addition, CDS in these communities is deeply influenced by living traditions and properties of the Gypsies' oral culture. Phenomena of input language closely related to these features are, for example, a specific way of modeling dialogue to infants, the extended use of test questions, and the use of folk genres specially modified for babies and children. Early introduction of children into these ways of speaking reflects their importance for Gypsy culture and Gypsy identity. Children's games reflecting the highly creative uses of the same features of traditional oral culture are also presented. (Gypsies, Romani, child-directed speech, language acquisition, socialization, pragmatics)

Romani is a fascinating test case for the role that language plays in the process of identity consolidation in a transnational context. Standardisation is no longer inherently connected to the ‘territorialisation’ of language. Instead, we witness a bottom-up process in which individuals take ownership of language and negotiate language practices. Status regulation and language planning can be instigated and even implemented by institutions other than national states. All of this leads to pluralism of form rather than unification. Yet language remains a key locus for political mobilisation. It allows players to claim authenticity, it offers opportunities for intervention by external facilitators, and it provides a discussion platform through which traditional images can be challenged and recognition can be awarded. (Romani, language planning, standardization, language policy, transnationalism)*

This article addresses the question as to why toddlers in The Netherlands may stop speaking their regional language—Limburgish—as their home language after entering preschool, even when both parents speak Limburgish at home. The question is addressed through the concept of the total linguistic fact (Silverstein 1985): language ideology, language choice, and language practices mutually shape and inform each other. Language ideologies in wider society impact educational practices in preschool. Hierarchical teacher-child and influential peer interactions show the negative effects of speaking Limburgish. Preschool language socialization practices have a profound effect on language choice and shift by toddlers at home who are still in the midst of their linguistic, pragmatic, cognitive, and social development of both Limburgish and Dutch as first languages. (Regional language, language ideology, preschool)

This paper introduces the theory of the lexical bar. It reports research studies conducted in England and Australia. A semantic barrier exists in the English lexicon that emerges from socio-historical factors and is reinforced by the socio-occupational orderings of contemporary society. This barrier separates the lexes of conservative peripheral social dialects from the lexes of dominant central dialects. It serves to produce differential attainment rates in education and to reproduce a social class-based division of labour in English-speaking societies. (Language and thought; language and knowledge; language and education; diachronic linguistics and the sociology of language; the lexes of social dialects; semantic field theory; measures of semantic complexity; the priority of words in meaning; history of English.)

This article is triggered by an analytic puzzle. In about half of a corpus of Korean telephone openings, callers produce a second summons, yeposeyyo, in the second turn of the opening sequence. The analysis unravels the interactional and organizational contingencies involved in the construction of the caller's second summons. It shows that the second summons operates as a vehicle for inviting recognition, and that the answerers overlay their work of recognition onto their talk in the third turn. In this way, the parties confront, work through, and display their underlying orientation to the organizational problem of establishing each other's identity in dealing with the second summons/answer sequence.An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics in 2004. I would like to thank John Heritage, Manny Schegloff, and Sung-Ock Sohn for valuable comments on earlier drafts. Barbara Johnstone and two anonymous readers for this journal also gave helpful advice.

Harmonious multiracialism is one of Singapore's national values, yet race in Singapore is almost always precariously managed. In 2019, race once again became the centre of public debate when a government-sanctioned advertisement featured a Chinese Singaporean actor ‘brownfacing’ as an Indian Singaporean, incurring public outcry. Local entertainers Preeti and Subhas Nair responded with a rap music video that criticised the advertisement and included the line ‘Chinese people always out here fucking it up’, which drew flak from the government and the Chinese community in Singapore. This article considers the state's response to the antiracist practices of the Nair siblings, and the subsequent labelling of their behaviour as racist. The article also introduces the concept of the state listening subject and describes its role in the semiotic process of rearticulation to elucidate how the Singaporean state selectively (de)couples race and language to maintain the national racial order. (Raciolinguistic ideology, multiracialism, rearticulation, state listening subject, race, Singapore, antiracism)*

This study of bilingual competence, linguistic attitudes, and language choice among secondary students in Valencia explores the effects of linguistic normalization since the removal of Franco's repressive measures against the Valencian language variety. The introduction of Valencian into the educational system and other measures have substantially reversed the decline of levels of competence and expanded its domains of usage but have only marginally decreased the dominance of Castilian. A survey of attitudes toward Valencian, Catalan (Barcelona variety) and Castilian reveals two distinct groups of patterns. One ascribes status and integrative value chiefly to Castilian, the other to Valencian and Catalan. Identifying the students manifesting the variants of these patterns according to socio-demographic, ideological, and behavioral factors shows how the current political dynamic between progressive nationalist forces and anti-Catalanist, Castilian-speaking forces is reflected in ongoing attitudinal divergence.Research was supported in part by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Sankoff is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and holds the Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Genomics.

Drawing on data gathered during fieldwork in an Indo-Guyanese village (1994–96), this article shows that the gender patterns for variable pronominal usage are strikingly stable over time. In both this study and one conducted by John Rickford more than twenty years ago, women, compared with men, use more basilectal variants in the category of 1sg. subject (mi vs. ai), but fewer in the category of 3sg. objects (am vs. shi/ii/it). Rather than explain this variation as a “leveling out” (Rickford 1979), it is here suggested that variants must be understood in terms of their contribution to an unfolding interactional engagement. The conclusion remarks on the continuing confusion among sociolinguists regarding the analytical relevance of gender as an external constraint on variation. A more developed understanding of these issues depends on recognizing the way in which language variation serves as an indirect and constitutive index of gender.

This study explores a type of language play among a community of improvisational theater (improv) performers, focusing on their strategic deployment of texts in interactions collected backstage while the troupe prepares for performance. Building on the work of Bauman & Briggs (1990), I adopt a process approach to the analysis of intertextuality, suggesting that community-specific ways of using entextualization, decontextualization, and recontextualization add to the work that has been done on intertextuality, given that it is not merely what texts are used but crucially how they are reshaped that can serve an important social function or the why of intertextuality—in this case explored in the context of member socialization. (Intertextuality, interactional sociolinguistics, ethnography of communication, improvisational theater, improv)*