This article aims to illuminate absences in the semiotic landscape of Crimea, resulting from the erasure of Ukraine after Russia's occupation of Crimea in 2014. By foregrounding what is not there, the study expands semiotic landscapes studies and critical sociolinguistic research more generally by interrogating absence and its haunting effects. More than 3,500 photographs of semiotic landscapes collected over two months of fieldwork between 2017 and 2019 together with fieldnotes serve as ethnographic data. The production of absence is interrogated through an analysis of its material effects, that is, voids, holes, and blank walls. It concludes that erasure does not simply negate Ukraine. Instead, pasts remain present, visible, and audible in semiotic landscapes. Absences, as part of a relational ontology of materiality, discourse, and affect, shout about complex invisibilized histories of violence. In this way, they suggest the need to probe traditional approaches in semiotic landscape research that rely on an ontology of presence. (Absence, trace, materiality, ghost, spectre, haunting, Crimea, Ukraine, semiotic landscape, linguistic landscape, interdiscursivity)*

Cushing argues that government policy in the UK is prescriptive and encourages similar policies at school level (as reported in the press), which in turn encourage the ‘policing’ of language by school teachers. I offer an alternative reading of the evidence in which government policy, as stated in official documents, generally avoids prescriptivism, as do an unknown number of schools and school teachers; where prescriptivism persists it reflects a prescriptive culture in society, not government policy. The conclusion is that government policy is only one influence on teachers’ behaviour, so if government wants to eliminate prescriptivism it needs to take a stronger position than simply avoiding prescriptivism in its own documents. (Education, prescriptivism, policy, Britain)

This book's manifest aim is “to bring to the non-specialized reader a substantial selection that reflects the … regional and disciplinary variations in views toward and experiences with ethnicity” (3). To be more precise, the book is about issues of ethnicity and language, as the title correctly suggests. It will certainly be of interest to nonspecialists and less advanced students, and useful as a resource for teaching and seminar work. I will comment on it on the basis of this declared intention, globally – that is, I will not go into the details of individual contributions.

In linguistic/semiotic landscape (LSL) studies, overall, time and temporalities have occupied a curious space between visibility and invisibility, resulting in time and temporalities being treated as an optional, additive, subordinate, or separate dimension in the linguistic and semiotic study of place-making. The term semiotic timescape serves as a heuristic concept which endeavours to centre time and its imbrication with space/place, with an explicit focus on the semiosis of ‘temporalized place-making’. The five articles in this special issue highlight the ‘complex and multiplex’ dimensions of time (Adam 2008) interconnected with spaces/places, as important aspects in understanding social realities and practices, via entanglements with multimodal meaning-making, materialities, embodiment, and politics of social actors and communities. (Semiotic timescapes, interconnectedness of time and space, complexities and multiplexities, multimodality, materialities)*

In this article I address a number of recent controversial language-related incidents and ideological statements regarding the use of French in the public sphere by Flemish nationalist aldermen in two Flemish towns. By drawing on interviews with different stakeholders (shop owners, aldermen, and passers-by), I address the different perceptions and ideological indexicalities of French shop names and signs in these Flemish contexts. In the data, the indexical field (Eckert 2008) of French in Flanders emerges as both polyvalent and indexically ordered, while the Flemish nationalist interpretations involve rescaled and historically recursive indexical meaning that can only be understood vis-à-vis the historical language ideological debate in Belgium. Language use in the public sphere has thus become a tool to impose monolingual ‘doxic logics’ (Bourdieu 1977) in Flanders, in spite of the fact that commercial and private language use is not regulated by language laws in Belgium. (Flemish nationalism, language ideologies, linguistic landscape)*

Scollon and Scollon (1979) claimed that the consonantal system of Chipewyan in Fort Chipewyan has been reduced to 16 segments from 39 influenced by Cree, a case of linguistic convergence. This conclusion was based on their incoherent and indiscriminate admixture of variable data. While there is no Chipewyan speaker whose consonantal inventory includes only 16 phonemes, there is ample evidence for the merger of two series of coronal affricates in an innovative system like in other Athapaskan languages that have had no intimate contact with Cree. That is, there is evidence for intralinguistic divergence, but not for interlinguistic convergence. Neither is there any evidence to support another major claim by the Scollons that the sibilant alternations in Chipewyan are correlated with “world views.” All the changes, including sibilant alternations and coronal mergers, recorded in Fort Chipewyan are those frequently observed in other Athapaskan communities. (Language contact, change, convergence, divergence, variability, obsolescence, register, sociolinguistic variable)

This article reports the emergence of a new “Americanized” argot in post-Stalinist Russia. It attempts to qualify the type of communicative code characteristic of the argot and to illuminate the link between the code and the communicative competence of argot-speaking groups. The article examines the pattern of recruitment into argot-speaking groups. It speculates on the set of relationships between this pattern and the process of socialization in the wider social milieu at school and in the families of different socioeconomic classes. (Sociolinguistics, symbolic anthropology, social change, Slavonic and Soviet studies, social boundaries and “primary groups,” revitalization movements)

The article examines the fact that the push for democracy and the end of Communist rule in Central Europe was phrased in terms of traditional European notions of freedom and democracy, in spite of longlived Communist attempts to redefine these and related terms in order to make them a Communist reality. Communist language usage was forcefully brought home to the West by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, especially in his notion of “doublethink”. We use the semantic theory of David Kronenfeld, along with Leon Festinger's theory of cognitive dissonance and Jean Piaget's views of how children's cognitive systems develop (including natural language), to derive a theoretical explanation for the failure of the Orwellian prediction and of the Communist linguistic efforts on which it was predicated. The explanation involves Ferdinand de Saussure's central idea that language is an interlinked system which is crucially social, and points to the critical role of childre's early language learning (in mundane, everyday contexts) on the development and structuring of their adult system. (Extensionist semantics, politics and language, cognitive dissonance, Central Europe, Poland, George Orwell, propaganda, language change)

This article investigates the transformation of minority language practice in the light of changing European language ideologies. Following a group of young Carinthian Slovenes from their rural hometowns to the capital of Vienna, this article analyzes their metadiscursive commentary about place and language in order to show how local language ideologies structure the indexical orders under which these individuals learn to assign meaning to linguistic practice. The data I present illustrates that these young members of a rurally stigmatized linguistic minority experience a transformation of their language-associated personhood in Vienna. There, their bilingualism allows them to be cosmopolitan participants in a European vision of mobile multilingual citizenship, while simultaneously troubling the language hierarchies erased by European language ideologies. (Linguistic minority, language ideology, indexical order, chronotopes, multilingualism, Carinthian Slovenes, Austria, Europe)

Sociolinguistic debates about the fate of the Welsh language have since at least the mid-20th century posited the relationship between language and political economy as a central factor in the death or rebirth of the Welsh language since the Industrial Revolution. Such studies have been concerned primarily with empirical head counts of actual speakers and the movements of populations and distributions of languages as determined by political economic independent variables. This article argues that the relationship between language and political economy was also crucially and consequentially construed in the 19th century in terms of “imagined” exemplary speakers of Welsh. In the imagined voice of the Welsh slate quarrier, Welsh elites of the 19th century found a “modern” Welsh-speaking figure who participated in industry while remaining Welsh, both linguistically and culturally, thereby associating the Welsh language itself with the desirable properties of modernity, particularly industrial productivity, and this allowed it to be imagined as a language at home in modernity.The research for this paper was made possible by a Reed College faculty grant and the friendship and generosity of Dylan Morgan and his family. Versions of this material have been presented at the AAA in San Francisco and Bard College, and I would like to thank my fellow participants and audiences there for their helpful comments. I would like to thank Richard Bauman, Mario Bick, Steve Coleman, Elizabeth Duquette, David Garrett, Alex Hrycak, and Rupert Stasch for comments and encouragement, as well as Jane Hill and the anonymous reviewers provided by Language in Society. Errors are my own.

Pro-independence parties won a narrow majority of parliamentary seats in the December 2017 elections in Catalonia. Should Catalonia at some point become independent from Spain, the respective status of Catalan and Spanish is a major issue about which there is significant divergence of opinion, not least within the independence movement in Catalonia. This article approaches the question of language officiality in a hypothetically independent Catalonia through the theoretical lens of linguistic authority, particularly the concepts of anonymity and authenticity. The data, an on-line discussion thread following an interview with a Catalan language activist, reveal a striking diversity of language ideological positions on both the nature of linguistic authority in Catalonia as things stand, as well as how such authority should be constructed and managed in the event of independence, particularly as regards questions of officiality. (Catalonia, linguistic authority, language ideologies, officiality)*

This project problematizes hegemonic conceptions of language by looking at the construction of ‘English’ in a nonprofit, community-based adult ESOL program in New York. I use ethnographic observation and interviews to uncover the discursive and pedagogical practices that uphold these hegemonic conceptions in this context. I find that the structural conditions of the program perpetuate a conception of ‘English’ shaped by linguistic racism and classism, despite the program's progressive ideals. Linguistic authority is centralized through the presentation of a closed linguistic system and a focus on replication of templatic language. This allows for the drawing of linguistic borders by pathologizing forms traditionally associated with racialized varieties of English, pointing to the persistence of raciolinguistic ideologies. Nevertheless, students destabilize these dominant ideas, revealing a disconnect between mainstream understandings of language and the way adult immigrant learners actually use language, and pointing to possibilities for alternate conceptions and pedagogies. (Language ideology, raciolinguistics, Standard English, adult ESOL)

This article investigates sexual and gender ideologies in online dating profiles of Sebian gay men using corpus-linguistic and discourse-analytic methods. Selected keywords are analysed in context, and particular attention is paid to collocation patterns, including grammatical collocates that are shown to carry discursive relevance beyond style. The analysis reveals that repeated associations centre on concepts of masculinity and normality, in a local indexical order of ‘proper’ manhood, sexuality, global modernity, and national identity. Overall, the texts are most strongly characterized by adversarial distance towards certain gay men, operating in normalizing assimilation to the national (heterosexual) citizen ideal. A broader mechanism, termed recursive normalisation, is described as underpinning the observed patterns. The findings are further discussed as highlighting the pitfalls of theory and social movements focused on social assimilation, arguing for the need for further queer linguistic deconstruction of the normalising discourses that intersect marginalized communities and broader, systemic hegemonies. (Gay men, online dating, masculinity, recursive normalization)

Anthropologists often construe “property” in terms of rights, obligations, and interests, or use “property” in a largely undefined way. The use of the language of rights as a metalanguage is questionable for it is culturally specific, having developed in the Early Modern period in Europe in the context of the spread of market relations and the growth of contract law. One might ask, how are “rights” expressed and constituted in the indigenous languages? The article examines the role of language in the constitution of possession relations with reference to three case studies: ownership of land by Kaiadilt people of Bentinck Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, possession more generally among Navajo of the southwest United States, and family/household “property” of the Southern Song dynasty of China. It focuses on the constitution of possessors, possessions and connections between them, and the expression of norms entailed by relations between possessor and possessum. (Property, possession, rights, Kayardild language, Navajo language, Southern Song dynasty, metalanguage)*

Until recently, the members of a community on the Andean-Amazonian agricultural frontier of Southern Peru have tended to limit their social ties to members of their own families. But the residents have begun to forge a ‘community’ through a semiotic distinction between private and public spaces, social practices, and domains of morality. Particular discursive phenomena in the asamblea ‘community meeting’ are deployed to create and maintain the community as a domain of action distinct from kin commitments, and participation in the asamblea offers a context in which to assume a novel political and moral subjectivity. Thus, the social organizational construct of the community is emergent in public interactions. The article concludes with a comparative analysis of public discourse in another comunidad nativa ‘indigenous community’ that has not embraced the notion of ‘community’, and demonstrates how code-switching allows leaders there to invoke both the private and public modes of social authority. (Amazonia, Andes, Matsigenka, Spanish, Quechua)*

Listeners often have the intuition that the speech of broadcast news reporters somehow ‘sounds different’; previous literature supports this observation and has described some distinctive aspects of newscaster register. This article presents two studies further describing the characteristic properties and functions of American English newscaster speech, focusing specifically on prosody. In the first, we investigate the production of newscaster speech. We describe the measurable differences in pitch, speed, intensity, and melodic features between newscaster and conversational speech, and connect those traits to perceptions of authority, credibility, charisma, and related characteristics. In the second, we investigate the perception of newscaster speech. Our experiments demonstrate that listeners can distinguish newscaster from conversational speech given only prosodic information, and that they use a subset of the newscasters’ distinguishing features to do so. (News, prosody, discourse registers, speech perception, credibility, authority)*

This article examines nominalization in Japanese television news programs with the aim of identifying its sociolinguistic meaning as it relates to context. Given that such programs create shifting contexts available for observation, approximately five hours of news programs (aired in Tokyo in 1992) are examined. The study finds that the use of nominalization varies between two related but different speech contexts identified as “TV Talk” and “TV Announcements.” The significance for the use of nominalization in Japanese is explored, adopting an interdisciplinary approach, by appealing to the critical socio-cultural concepts of uchi ‘inside’ and soto ‘outside’. (Context, Japanese, nominalization, media discourse, sociocultural concepts)

The language of academic journals tends to become so technical that only specialists are able to understand the unnecessarily complex features of vocabulary, syntax, discourse, and format. This seems particularly unfortunate at a time when the results of present-day scholarship in linguistic and cultural anthropology need to be as widely accessible as possible. An examination of problems in two articles in Language and one in the American Anthropologist points out the nature of the difficulties and some of the solutions. (Sociolinguistics, academic dialects, writing, jargons, English)